


And Fortune at Your Door

by virdant



Series: A House in the Sun [3]
Category: Glee
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Arranged Marriage, Future Fic, Ghost Marriage, Ghosts, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-22 17:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17667128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virdant/pseuds/virdant
Summary: It’s a hundred years of work to stand on the same ground together. It’s thousand years of work to lie in the same bed.Years later, Blaine, still married to Sebastian's ghost, is faced with his greatest challenge: living.The third and final part of A House in the Sun, my Seblaine ghost marriage AU, where Blaine is faced with challenges in his life post high school and university. You should read A Shifting Foundation and Build These Walls Anew first.





	1. 壽

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to everybody who's been with me, on this long journey. It's been long, it's been hard, and it's been so fulfilling.
> 
> In honor of this lunar new year, I am very happy to share with you Fortune, the third and final part of A House in the Sun. As usual, this is a ghost marriage story, drawn from Chinese cultural traditions.
> 
> Happy Lunar New Year. May you be blessed with fortune.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years after high school and university, Blaine is faced with changes in his life.

五福臨門  
_may the five blessings descend upon this home. - Chinese blessing_

  


* * *

  


“Wish you’d had one of these, Smythe?” Thad slurred, downing yet another glass of wine. The dance floor of Thad’s wedding was crowded, bass thrumming in the marrow of their bones. The groom himself squinted at Blaine, tie lost sometime between one and three hours ago, sleeves rolled and haphazardly shoved up past his elbows, vest askew, shoes unlaced. He shook the glass, thankfully empty, before nudging Blaine, again, with a too-sharp elbow.

Blaine raised his glass in response. “I have one of my own.”

“Not what I meant.”

Blaine shook his head, downing his own wine—third glass, and thank god he wasn’t driving tonight—and snagging Thad’s before he could drop it. Thad had always been a sloppy drunk. “I got this,” he shouted over the song, nudging Thad towards some of his college friends, before heading over to deposit the glasses onto a nearby table.

Wes waved him over, where he was catching up with David, Jared, and some of the other Warblers. Blaine headed over, stopping by the bar to get another glass of wine. Ashley, Wes’ girlfriend from college, flung a too-affectionate arm around his shoulders as he drew up.

“Hey,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.

“Blaine,” David crowed fondly back. He nudged Ashley out of the way to bump shoulders affectionately. “Wish we had one of these for you back when you got married.”

“I was fifteen,” Blaine protested. “It was pretty somber.”

“How did you do the vigil if you were getting married?” Jared asked, drunk enough to lose his filter.

“Did you do the vigil?” Anthony asked.

“I hope you did the vigil,” Wes muttered into his own wine.

“I was fifteen!” He flung an arm up, keeping his wine balanced through extensive experience mixing alcohol with Warblers. “I think Sebastian’s mom did the vigil.”

“So,” David said, returning to the point. “You wish you had one of these?”

Blaine stared out into the crowd—Thad was dancing with a group of his college friends, Amelia in a cluster of her own. Their bodies orbited each other like a binary star, separate but aware. As he watched, Thad broke away from his friends to catch Amelia’s fingers between his, pull her into an embrace and kiss as everybody around them cheered. Jared put his fingers in his mouth and let out an ear-piercing whistle.

Blaine insisted, “I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got now.”

“Pretty happy, huh?” a familiar voice murmured in his ear, and Blaine blinked awake, Sebastian perched next to him in the hotel bed. Sebastian smiled, hair soft against his face, long-limbed and limbs languid with sleep. “Hello, Husband.”

“Husband,” Blaine repeated, quietly, blinking the vestiges of wakefulness away, settling into the dream even as his body relaxed deeper in sleep. Sebastian’s hand was right there, and he reached out to twist their fingers together. “Sebastian. What were you saying?”

“Finally with me, huh”

It was a familiar statement. Blaine nodded.

“Where were you?”

“Thad’s wedding.” Blaine turned, nudging Sebastian’s back with his elbow. “Got married today to Amelia.”

“How was it?”

“Big.” He shifted, sliding an arm under his head to study Sebastian’s expression better. “Good wine.”

“Did you get drunk?”

“On wine?”

“No open bar?”

“There was,” Blaine admitted. “I just had wine though.”

“At least it was good wine,” Sebastian said. He turned away, fingers still curled around Blaine’s. “Did you like it?”

“The wine?”

“The wedding.”

Blaine twisted to lie on his back. Sebastian was silent, his posture straight-backed and tense. Blaine said, very quietly, “Why do you ask?”

“It was just a question.”

“I married you,” Blaine said. “I love you.”

Sebastian murmured, “It wasn’t an accusation.”

“I know,” he said. He let his fingers relax around Sebastian’s. “But sometimes—”

It rose from the depths of memory: Kurt’s voice, shrill and furious; his friends from college, bewildered; even Nick, that one time they got drunk during the summer. Sebastian’s dead, Blaine. Do you wish he was alive? Don’t you wonder…

Sebastian said, “Sometimes I wonder too.”

“I’m happy with you,” he insisted.

“I’m happy with you too,” he replied, and his hand also relaxed, until their hands lay, one upon the other, in tacit understanding. “I’m glad you married me.”

  


* * *

  


Thad’s wedding seemed to have unlocked the floodgates. Two months later, Wes was engaged, and David was following afterwards. Every month, Blaine donned suit and tie and flew across the country to an assortment of weekends. If there wasn’t a wedding, there was a bachelor party to attend. Sebastian was an ever-present ghost in his dreams, fading as he drifted awake.

“If I could have nightmares, I would have nightmares of weddings,” Blaine murmured. He had fallen asleep to Sebastian making breakfast in his apartment kitchen, himself sitting at the counter, watching.

“What made them stop?” Sebastian drawled, even though he knew. He smirked over his shoulder, and Blaine couldn’t help the smile.

“Do you even have to ask?”

“I like to hear you say it.”

“Your ego knows no bounds.” He leaned forward, propping himself on his elbows and catching his chin in the palms of his hands. Sebastian turned away, busying himself with the frying pan, and Blaine closed his eyes, filtering out fragrant agarwood to inhale eggs and bacon. “I’m not saying it.”

“But Husband,” Sebastian said, in that same teasing drawl.

Blaine stood up.

“Sit down.” He waved a spatula. “I’m almost done.”

“It doesn’t do anything for me here.”

“Feed the soul,” Sebastian said, sliding a plate before him. “What do you tell your kids? Healthy thoughts leads to a healthy life?”

“I don’t tell them that.”

“You just sing it at them instead.”

Blaine rolled his eyes. He had started training to be a music therapist a while ago, working with kids, and this was a well-trod conversation, Sebastian’s voice never leaving the timbre of his faintly sarcastic drawl. “And what do you do?”

“You mean beside cook food that you refuse to eat? Sing at you, mostly,” Sebastian said. He plated eggs and bacon for himself, sliding onto a barstool beside Blaine and offering a bouquet of forks. 

Blaine took one. “I only need one.”

“It’s more romantic this way. I haven’t gotten any flowers recently.”

“It’s not like the old ones die.”

Sebastian covered his mouth in a mocking gasp. “You want me to give you old roses?”

Blaine rolled his eyes again. “Where do you get them anyways, if not from me?”

Sebastian studied the ceiling intently. “That’s my secret to keep.”

“Are you making Albert burn roses so you can give them to me in my dreams?” He raised an eyebrow incredulously as he tried the eggs. They were unfairly good, but the faint hunger he had fallen asleep with remained despite his consumption.

Sebastian took a bite of his own eggs, so he wouldn’t have to say anything.

Blaine narrowed his eyes back, before taking another bite. They finished their breakfast in mostly amicable silence, Sebastian smirking as Blaine narrowed his eyes back. The familiar tension lingered as they washed the dishes, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as Sebastian scrubbed and Blaine dried. Dishes done, Sebastian turned off the sink and reached for Blaine with a sudsy hand, and Blaine drew close, chest to chest, tilting his head up to meet Sebastian with a fond kiss.

“I don’t know how I feel about regifted roses,” he murmured, finally.

Sebastian’s mouth curved against his. His voice was just as quiet. “Is it really regifting if I got them from my family medium?” 

“Did you?”

“You’ll have to find out.” He brushed a soft kiss across Blaine’s forehead, his fingers brushing the inside of Blaine’s wrist softly. “Blaine.”

He closed his eyes, inhaling agarwood deeply into his lungs. “Sebastian,” he said, and when he woke, it was to the stirrings of hunger. He laid—alone, in the bedroom of his one-bedroom apartment only two stops away from Mt. Sinai Hospital where he worked—until he got up and padded quietly to the shrine he kept at the foot of his bed.

He lit the agarwood incense, and when it burned down, he went to buy roses.

  


* * *

  


The Class of 2013 Warblers had been assigned their own table at Tony’s wedding, and Blaine dropped his place-card at an empty spot and went to join the line at the bar. Nick and Jeff were already there, squabbling cheerfully with each other. Nick’s fiancé Lisa and Jeff’s wife Karen were nearby; Lisa waved absently before continuing their conversation with Amelia, alone.

Thad had actually been in the wedding—Tony, two years younger than them, had made it onto the council their senior year, and had immediately become Thad’s protégé. (Blaine wasn’t entirely sure himself, but he had heard something about some of the most thought-out carpool charts in Warbler history after they had all graduated.) Amelia had been temporarily abandoned to cocktail hour while the wedding party finished up photos and she had taken to the other Warbler wives with aplomb.

“Did you find our table?” Nick asked, as Blaine drew up to them.

Blaine jerked his thumb over his shoulder, in the general direction of where their table was. “I think they put all of our year together.”

“That’s one way to do it. I’m still a little surprised Tony invited all of us.” Nick shrugged. “I figured he would want us gone after we graduated.”

“He’s close with Thad. And you were on the council for two years.”

“Still. That’s two of us. He invited the whole lot. Anthony and Andrew are somewhere, and I think I saw Beat earlier.”

“Why didn’t they sit with us?” Blaine asked.

“They were in the back.” Nick gesticulated in a direction that was not the back of the room, or even the direction of where the ceremony had been held. “I saw them sitting with Beat Junior.”

“He has a name,” Jeff pointed out. 

“Beat?” Nick asked, incredulously. “I haven’t called him Jason since we were put in the same group during freshman orientation. Even the teachers called him Beat by the time we graduated.”

“Matt,” Jeff corrected, referring to the afore mentioned Beat Junior. Matt had been a freshman who had joined the Warblers their senior year to learn from Beat before he graduated. Nick, on the council, had decided that Matt should be called Beat Junior and had yet to unlearn the habit even though he had been out of high school for at least ten years. Matt, hence coined Beat Junior, had taken to his nickname with both a grimace and grace. “He’s not even a beatboxer anymore; he switched to singing baritone parts in his junior year. You can call him by his name.”

Nick rolled his eyes without rancor. “Gotta relive our youth. Why else do we come to these things?” 

Lisa, Amelia, and Karen—in front of them—ordered their drinks and stepped away, still chatting as they picked over the hos d’oeuvres. Wine in hand, Blaine joined Nick and Jeff as they found other Warblers—significant others on one arm, wine in the other hand—and caught up. Blaine was conspicuously alone.

They had all paired up; Thad and Amelia, Nick and Lisa, Jeff and Karen. Trent had a boyfriend that he was happy to introduce to all of them. Beat’s wife, whom Blaine had first met two years ago at Nick’s wedding, was pregnant. Blaine sat, toasted, and ate—the eleventh wheel, married to a ghost. He joined the others on the dance floor when it opened, standing to the side for the slow dances with a steadily emptying glass of wine. When the wedding ended, Blaine peeled off his suit, hanging it up in the quiet hotel room.

He fell asleep on the too soft hotel mattress, and when he dreamed, Sebastian came to him, his mouth quietly somber.

“I love you,” Blaine sad.

Sebastian’s fingers twisted around his. “Yeah,” he said. “I do too.”

He shook his head, an urgency pressing against his tongue. “I love you,” he insisted.

Sebastian’s head bowed. He said, “Which wedding is this?”

“Does it matter?”

“Do you wish that you had one?”

“Why are you saying this?” Blaine demanded. “I love you.”

“I know,” Sebastian said. “You say the same things after every single wedding.”

Blaine froze.

Around him, the room took form—Sebastian’s childhood bedroom, Sebastian sitting on the edge of the bed, turned away from him. Blaine, under the covers, felt the weight of the duvet like a shackle.

“I love you,” Blaine said.

Sebastian said, “Is that enough?”

  


* * *

  


Blaine was in the hospital when he got the phone call, and he flew back to Ohio. 

The years had been kind to Blaine, as he graduated from high school, college, and then his master’s program. He had settled into his position as a music therapist in Mt. Sinai Hospital, and his hours had settled into something approaching regularity. Sebastian had been present the entire time, in dreams, if not in person.

The years had similarly been kind to Albert Smythe. His practice had expanded, and he had moved into a different building, one he no longer shared with other mediums. A secretary directed Blaine towards several plush chairs while he notified Albert, and Blaine sat and waited, absently checking his phone. When the door opened, Blaine looked up and was unsurprised to see Albert.

He was surprised to see Alexander Smythe next to Albert.

He had last seen his father-in-law in April, when he had flown back to Ohio for tomb sweeping. Alexander Smythe had left the cognac on the kitchen counter, along with his car keys, and Blaine had taken both with him in the pre-dawn drive to the cemetery, this time offering the cognac as a shot as he had since he’d turned 21, sipping his undoctored coffee as the cool air brushed against his cheeks. He had returned back to the house as morning traffic reached its peak, letting himself back in with the keys that had once been Sebastian’s, eaten breakfast with his father-in-law, and returned to the cemetery shortly afterwards, this time with Alexander Smythe. They had swept the tomb and burned incense even as the crowds milled about, families fulfilling their annual duty. After lunch, they met up with the other local Smythes. There was a loud family dinner, with cousins and uncles and aunts, and Blaine had spent the night before visiting his parents the next day. He had flown back to New York soon after.

Blaine said, “Oh.”

His father-in-law didn’t smile. “Blaine,” he said.

“Oh.” He glanced at Albert, and then back at his father-in-law. “I… I didn’t know you would be here.”

Alexander Smythe stepped to the side, and said, “Come in. We need to talk.”

  


* * *

  


“This isn’t how I would have wanted it to happen,” Albert had said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to spring this on you.” 

“You didn’t spring it on me,” Blaine had replied. Albert had sent a text message, asking when would be a good time to call. Blaine had given Albert his lunch hour, and had listened, in its entirety, to Albert explaining that something had come up in the family, and that if Blaine would please come back to Ohio—as soon as he could, just for a weekend, to discuss the issue. Alexander Smythe would pay for the plane ticket, if that was a concern.

Blaine had anticipated the worst. 

He had not anticipated the baby, awake but not screaming, studying him with Sebastian’s green eyes. 

Blaine had said, for want of words, “It’s supposed to be a boy.” 

Alexander Smythe had said nothing.

“She’s Alyssa’s daughter,” Albert had explained. Alyssa was three years younger than Blaine, one of Sebastian’s cousins that had become Blaine’s. She was not married. She didn’t even have a boyfriend—not anymore. “And Aly’s…”

Blaine was thirty this year. He had a ghost for a husband, a steady job, and the unrelenting memory of Sebastian’s voice, that lunar new year, reminding him of what his marriage entailed. 

_You’ll adopt a child and it’ll never be yours, it’ll be your dead husband’s cousin’s child that you’re fostering, but they’ll call you father and you’ll have to pretend that you don’t resent what your life’s become, raising a stranger’s kid as your own._

He had no words, except, “Alyssa isn’t a stranger.”

“Why would she be?” His father-in-law had rumbled.

He had shaken his head, not just to dislodge the memory, but also because there was nothing to say. “What’s her name?” he had asked, instead.

“Sophia,” he said, now, cradling her downy hair in a hand. His father-in-law—his daughter’s grandfather—had already prepared a nursery in the room next to Blaine’s. “Sophia.” 

It was supposed to be a son, a boy to carry on the family name. His dead husband’s cousin’s child to foster, to raise as his own—it was supposed to be a son. At first sight, he had thought that Sophia, in her green onesie and under her animal print blanket, was Alyssa’s son. But even as Albert elaborated—Alyssa couldn’t reasonably raise her, Alyssa wasn’t even married, Alyssa couldn’t abort the child, hadn’t wanted to, but hadn’t known how to raise the child either—Blaine had said nothing. Had made no protestations. Blaine would do it, wouldn’t he? Here was the Smythe child he had sworn to raise; he could be her father, he could—

He hadn’t needed the platitudes or explanation. The moment he had walked into Albert’s office and seen Sophia, he had understood why he had been called from New York back to Westerville. 

_You always want to do the right thing._

He closed his eyes and brushed a kiss over her solid forehead. “Sophia,” he said, again, in lieu of any other words. 

_Instead of doing the right thing because you want to._

  


* * *

  


“Congratulations, it’s a girl.”

Blaine scowled back at his husband.

Sebastian’s smirk eased. “But seriously. Isn’t it supposed to be a son?”

“I’m also pretty sure that you were supposed to marry a girl, if we’re talking tradition,” Blaine retorted acerbically. 

Sebastian shrugged. He was unfairly youthful, as if he had decided, at twenty-seven, that this was the face and body he wanted, and that was that. Blaine, on the other hand, emerged into the dream thirty years old, having just acquired a baby.

“I didn’t think it would happen so soon,” Blaine said. He thought he’d be able to stay like this for longer.

“Alyssa’s always been a mess.”

“And you would know,” Blaine said, sourly. “The last time you met her, she was ten.”

Sebastian went quietly still.

Blaine closed his eyes, scrubbing at his face.

“I’m present at family shrines,” Sebastian said, steadily.

Blaine inhaled. “Yeah. That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” Sebastian said, the same distance that had resulted in Sebastian sequestering himself in the realm of the dead once more present in his voice. “I know that I’m dead, and you’re married to a ghost.”

“Sebastian,” Blaine snapped. Sebastian paused, and Blaine continued, “I’m a _single parent now.”_

__

His face contorted, and then he conceded, with sincere grace, “Alright. I’m sorry.”

Blaine held out his hand, palm up, and Sebastian laced their fingers together. They sat at the dining table, one across from the other, holding hands as agarwood smoke wended its way through the cracks between the walls. Sebastian’s hand was a steady pressure against Blaine’s; he read Sebastian’s guilt in the tightness along Sebastian’s knuckles, his apology in the easing tension of his palm, his regret in the brush of Sebastian’s thumb against Blaine’s index finger.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Blaine admitted. “A baby.”

“What type of father do you want to be?” Sebastian asked.

“I don’t know.” He thought of his father, taking him to the park to feed grapes to the ducks, paying for his Dalton tuition, flying out to New York when they made it to Nationals. He thought of his mother, arranging a marriage to Sebastian Smythe. He thought of Alexander Smythe, leaving cognac on the counter on tomb sweeping mornings, attending his graduations. “A good one, I hope.”

“You will be.” Sebastian squeezed, gently. “I know you will be.”

  


* * *

  


The next morning, he called his parents to cancel the lunch they had planned; they refused, instead citing a desire to meet Sophia.

“You knew?”

“Well, we didn’t know if you were going to say yes,” his mother said.

He stared at the wall; Sophia was on the other side, sleeping. “Did you think I would say no?”

“A child is a lot of responsibility.” It echoed as if his father was also speaking, even though it was only his mother’s voice. “And you’re still young.”

“I’m thirty.” His fingers closed around the phone. “Some of my friends have kids already.”

“It’s still very sudden.”

It was. He took a deep breath. His flight back to New York had been planned for tomorrow; his apartment was too small, wasn’t childproof, he didn’t have furniture, he—

“Your father is going to drive,” his mother said, steadfast in the same way when she presented betrothal papers to him when he was thirteen, when she asked Blaine to enter a ghost marriage. “We’ll be there in two hours. We’ll talk then.”

He stayed on the phone, listening to his mother’s steady chatter as she hustled Blaine’s father out and into the car, the engine turning over, the radio a whisper filtering through the speakers. It had been a month since he had last talked to his mother, and she filled his ears with news before she finally assured him that they would be in Westerville very soon, and they would talk then.

Two hours later, his mother took his hands, very gently, and said, “Blaine, you are my son, and Sophia is my granddaughter.”

He bowed his head and admitted, “I don’t know what to do.”

  


* * *

  


He cancelled his flight.

He took an extra week off work instead, staying in Ohio. Alyssa had been taking care of Sophia, barely, and Albert had been helping, so Sophia had never known Blaine. He spent a week in his room, learning how to change diapers and support his daughter’s neck. His mother stayed over in a guest room, teaching Blaine the essentials. There was an unending stream of relatives—Blaine’s aunts and uncles and cousins, and no small amount of Smythe relatives as well—all trying to “help”. Alexander Smythe let them in without question, but Blaine felt the lingering shiver of guilt every time another relative entered Alexander Smythe’s home.

“Trust your instincts,” his mother said, as she hefted Sophia into her arms, cradling the neck. “And be gentle.”

Blaine stared down at his hands. Sophia, in his hands, was both too fragile and a heavy weight. His fingers clenched into his palms, and he carefully unfurled them under his mother’s steady patience. 

“She’s not a pet,” his mother said. “She’s your daughter.”

“I know.” He took his daughter from his mother, supporting her neck. Sophia let out a quiet sigh, settling against Blaine’s chest. “I—” 

His mother said, “If you aren’t ready, then don’t take her back to New York with you.” She folded her hands into her lap. “There are other relatives who can take her.” There had been a veritable tidal wave of relatives—not just Smythes but Blaine’s relatives as well—who were willing to take her.

He stared down at the downy head. “I know,” he said.

“I know, Blaine.” His mother touched his knee, and he didn’t flinch. “You entered this marriage because you thought it was the right thing to do. But raising a child because you think it’s the right thing to do…”

It wouldn’t be fair to Sophia, Blaine thought. He wasn’t being coerced. He could refuse, and Sophia would go to another relative in the way that children were fostered by grandparents or aunts or uncles. He was the first choice—married to Sebastian’s spirit—but not the last choice.

He could hand Sophia back to Albert, and Albert would find another relative who could raise Sophia. Albert could foster her. His father-in-law could foster her, if there was nobody else. Blaine had all of the choice in the world. 

He clutched his daughter and said, “I want to.”

“Blaine.”

He shook his head, and Sophia’s cheek was warm and heavy against his chest. Her heart fluttered under his fingertips, her breath soft and steady. “I want to,” he said again, thinking of waking up to his empty apartment. Sophia was a warm weight against his chest. “I’m scared,” he admitted, “But I want to.”

His mother took his hand and shifted it, just a little. “Just hold her like that,” she said, and Blaine did: gently and firmly at the same time.

When the week ended, his mother flew back to New York with him. Blaine returned to work while his mother and various New York relatives watched Sophia. Between work and taking care of logistics, Blaine barely slept, and when he did sleep, it was to fragmented dreams of Sebastian’s voice, the warm palm against his cheek, the sudden cries of a hungry or upset child cutting through the agarwood scent. A month later, Blaine had gotten used to dreamless naps, feeding and changing his daughter, and the layout of the larger two-bedroom apartment he had moved into. 

His mother returned to Ohio, and it was just Blaine, Sophia, and lingering dreams of Sebastian. 

And then Cooper knocked on his door.


	2. 攸好德

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cooper comes to visit, and old hurts are brought to light.

When Blaine was in his junior year of high school, Cooper had come back to visit. He hadn’t made it to the wedding, to any of Blaine’s performances with the Warblers, or to the family trip that they took to New York City, but he showed up one April day at the Dalton campus, trying to sign Blaine out for lunch.

“Parents and guardians only,” Cooper exclaimed. “How do they not know who I am?”

“Pretty sure that ‘guy from freecreditratingtoday.com’ commercial isn’t on my parent and guardian list,” Blaine muttered, picking at his pasta as they sat in a nearby pub. After he had been summoned from class, Blaine had rather quickly vouched for Cooper, and they had left campus for lunch. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t visit my little brother?”

“Sure.” Blaine’s fingers tightened on the fork. “But why now?” Why not last year, or the year before, or the year before that? Why now, after the dust had settled and all that was left was preparation for Nationals?

Cooper said, “Blainey,” and Blaine said, “Don’t call me that,” and Blaine was asleep and dreaming when Cooper left: again, and again, and again.

  


* * *

  


“Blainey!”

Blaine froze, door halfway open. Cooper pushed in unceremoniously, dragging his suitcase behind him. Sophia, half-asleep on his chest, blinked awake and began to wail.

“Wow! She’s a screecher isn’t she?”

“What are you doing here?” Blaine demanded, even as he struggled to close the door before Sophia’s cries could wake the rest of the building. “It’s six in the morning.” He managed to get the door closed. “You live in LA.”

“I can’t visit my little brother?”

“You haven’t before.” Sophia wailed a little more, and Blaine rocked her back and forth, murmuring soothing nonsense. When he looked up, Cooper was frowning at him. “What?”

“Nothing! Nothing!” He leaned against his suitcase. “So, I thought I’d stop by and visit.”

“You live on the other side of the country.”

“What’s a little distance between siblings?”

“Nothing. That’s why I wanted to keep it that way.”

“Wow,” Cooper drawled. “That’s cold. What happened to my cute little brother?”

“I’m thirty.” Sophia finally settled with a happy burble, and Blaine closed his eyes in lieu of something more cutting. “Seriously, Cooper. You can’t just show up at my door and say you’re visiting.”

“Yeah, I forgot. Because you’re married and have a kid. How’s the ball and chain? I heard you can’t get laid.”

Blaine froze. “What?”

Cooper continued, blithely, not looking up from where he had hauled his suitcase onto Blaine’s couch and had started unpacking: clothes, shoes, a box of macadamia chocolates that he was pretty sure was from the airport, “How long’s it been now?”

“Fifteen years.” Blaine said, flatly.

“And you haven’t gotten a divorce yet?”

“Are you just here to question my decisions?” Blaine curled his chin over Sophia’s fair head. She had Sebastian’s hair, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she had Alyssa’s hair. “You didn’t get enough of that when we still lived under the same roof?”

Cooper sighed. “You’re so dramatic.”

“I’m dramatic?” Blaine echoed, incredulously. “You dropped out of college to be an actor.”

“You got married to a ghost.”

Blaine’s spine stiffened. “Yeah,” he said. “At least I got married.”

Cooper paused in response. “You know, Blainey, if I wanted to get lectured by Mom, I would have gone to Mom’s.”

“Maybe you should have.”

Cooper raised a brow. “You’re turning your own brother out onto the streets?”

“You have an apartment in LA and Mom and Dad still keep your room exactly as you left it, which you’d know if you actually visited them. You have plenty of places to go.” Blaine closed his eyes. “How long are you staying?”

Cooper flung himself onto the couch cushions. “Oh, let’s say a month.”

Blaine shook his head, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. “God.”

“What?”

He opened his mouth, and then closed it. In the absence of anything else, he said, finally, “There’s a spare bedroom.”

“Yeah, Mom told me. Pretty sweet place you’ve got here.”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “You can put your stuff there.”

  


* * *

  


“Doesn’t look much like you, does she?”

Blaine frowned from where he was contemplating jars of mashed food. “What?”

“Your kid. She doesn’t look much like you, does she.”

“She’s a Smythe.”

“Like you are.” He leaned back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You married into their family, didn’t you?”

“You know I did.” Cooper hadn’t gone to the wedding. He’d had an audition. He’d sent an e-card a week later, after Mom had asked Blaine if he’d gotten a card from Cooper and Blaine had said no. The timing had been too obvious for Blaine to have any doubts about the chain of events.

“Yeah. Sure.” Cooper propped his arm against the dining table, as if posing for a magazine. He held the position for a second, before shifting to better showcase his good side. Blaine was familiar with the routine enough to roll his eyes aggressively at the mashed peas. Cooper said, after a moment, “What’s her name?”

Blaine paused, hand over the carrots. “Who?”

“Your kid. The one who was screaming earlier.”

“She wasn’t screaming. She was just surprised and upset at being woken up. We don’t get visitors at six in the morning because people know better than to ring the doorbell on a sleeping baby.”

“Sure. What’s her name?”

Blaine snorted. “What? Didn’t Mom tell you?” He paused, turning to take in Cooper’s expression. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “You forgot?”

Cooper said, airily, “I had a lot going on when Mom called.”

“She’s your niece, what could be more important than your niece’s name?”

Cooper waved a hand in the air. “Never mind that.”

Blaine closed his eyes, in order to keep himself from rolling them anymore. “Her name is Sophia.”

“You pick that name?”

“Does it matter?”

Cooper was quiet for a moment, before he said, lightly, “No, of course not.”

He closed the cupboard—quietly, despite his urge to slam it. “Why are you here, Cooper?”

“I can’t visit my niece?”

“You didn’t even know her name.”

“I do now. It’s Sophie.”

“Sophia.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

The sun slanted in through the windows, casting the apartment golden. Blaine stared at wooden cupboards, a beam of morning light separating a single strip of pale wood from the rest. A uniform maple marred by the entrance of morning light.

Blaine thought of his daughter, sleeping, and his husband, dead. His brother who he hadn’t seen in years, visiting from across the country, and all he could think of was going to sleep and finding Sebastian in dreams.

Cooper said, “You know, you used to be a lot nicer.”

“Yeah? You’d know, wouldn’t you.”

“This is what I mean.”

“What?”

Cooper said, “What’s happened to you? You never used to be like this.”

Blaine touched the edge where the light slanted over the cupboard. His voice was weary. “Was this before or after I almost died?”

  


* * *

  


“Cooper’s visiting?”

“Did you know?” Blaine hissed into his phone. 

On the other side of the line, his mother hummed. “He asked for your address, but I thought he was just going to send a card.”

“He showed up at six am!”

“Oh. Did he wake Sophia up?”

“Yeah.” Blaine forced his fingers to relax on the phone. He had a break between patients, but he was still in the hospital, the beeping of the machines always present, the low murmur of voices following him to the stairwell where he had decided to make the call. When he was fourteen, he had never thought that he would willingly walk into a hospital every day, but that was before he had gone into the realm of the dead. “He also didn’t know her name.”

“Oh.” She paused. “I thought I told him.”

“You did. He’s just.” He heaved a sigh. “He’s just Cooper. You know how he is. If it’s not about him, it doesn’t matter.”

“Blaine. He’s your brother.”

“Yeah. And he’s just as annoying as he was when we still lived under the same roof.”

“Blaine.”

He huffed. “You know it’s true.”

“He cares about you.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing it.”

“Just give him a chance. How long is he visiting for?”

“He said a month.”

“Give him a chance, Blaine. You aren’t children anymore.”

Blaine closed his eyes. “Can’t you get him to visit you and Dad?”

“Blaine.”

“Right.” That was a familiar tone of voice. He took a deep breath. “Okay. Thanks, Mom. Bye.”

“Blaine?”

He hung up, banged his head very gently against the wall, and sighed—again, before going back to work.

  


* * *

  


“So. Your brother.”

He opened his eyes. Sebastian stood by the door, lit only by the city lights as they cast a muted glow through the curtains. He looked as if he had come home late from work, slipped quietly through the hallways to make his way to their bedroom, where Blaine was already asleep.

“Do we have to talk about Cooper?” Blaine asked. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah?”

Blaine sat up, the blankets pooling around him. Sebastian had drifted to the window. “What do you see?”

“Paris,” Sebastian said.

“From your memory, or mine?”

He didn’t turn, his shoulders obscuring the skyline. “Mine.”

Blaine glanced around. In the darkest corners, the room seemed to warp, not quite his new bedroom in New York, not quite Sebastian’s bedroom in Ohio, not quite the bedroom in Sebastian’s mother’s house. Something in the darkness reminded Blaine of the basement at his parents place, the dark corners of hide and seek when Cooper always found him, before he grew too old for his baby brother.

Sebastian turned, his face cast in shadow. “You alright? You seem lost.”

Blaine said, “Where’s Sophia?”

Sebastian paused. “She’s not here.”

“She should be.” His hands closed over the blankets. Across the bed, where Sophia’s crib usually stood, there was nothing but pervasive darkness. “She’s your daughter.”

“She’s not here.” He crossed the expanse of shadow. “Blaine. You’re dreaming.”

Blaine reached a hand, and Sebastian caught his fingers. “Have you seen her?”

“Put her in front of the shrine,” he said. 

“She looks like you.”

“I believe it. She’s a Smythe.”

Blaine’s breath caught. “Like I’m not.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” Blaine said. He closed his eyes. He remembered being a child again, never as good as his older brother Cooper. “I married you. I’m a Smythe now.”

“Blaine—”

In the quiet, he asked, “Can’t we just go to bed?”

Sebastian’s hand wrapped around his. “If you want.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia was crying when he woke up.

He’d just scooped her into his arms when Cooper appeared at the door, naked, rubbing his eyes and muttering, “Wow.”

“Cooper!” Blaine hissed, even as he checked Sophia’s diaper. “Pants.”

“She’s too small to remember.” He yawned.

“I’m not.” Blaine wrinkled his nose. A week had made him adept enough at changing diapers, and he set this skill to use, even as Cooper yawned and shuffled his bare ass away to put on pants. He emerged, in sweatpants and a shirt, as Blaine was heating formula in the kitchen. Cooper squinted at Sophia. Sophia blinked back at him.

“She’s awfully small,” Cooper noted.

“She’s a baby.”

“I thought babies were bigger. You were bigger.”

Blaine looked up. “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Give me some credit,” Cooper said, directing his attention to the coffee machine. “It wasn’t that long ago.”

“Thirty-six years ago.”

“Yeah.” He set the coffee brewing. “You were pretty tiny.”

He fell quiet as he fed Sophia, Cooper focused on the coffee. For a moment, it was just the two of them and Sophia; outside, a car horn blared, muffled through the window. Blaine winced.

Cooper eyed him. “You miss Ohio?”

Sophia suckled on the bottle. “No. Do you?”

He poured a cup of coffee. “I miss Mom’s cooking.”

Blaine snorted. “Yeah.” He smiled. “I miss that. I’m good without all the cornfields though.”

“Yeah. There’s a lot of them,” Cooper said.

Blaine tossed a towel onto his shoulder before burping Sophia. Fed and changed, she settled, blinking at her surroundings.

“You’re good at that.”

Sophia was warm in his arms. “I’ve had her for a bit now.”

“Yeah. Bet Mom was glad to finally get a grandkid.”

Blaine stared at the wall beyond Cooper. “I think she was.”

He drained his coffee. “Okay, Squirt.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Blaine.” He stood, his shoulders broad, his hair coiffed. He looked larger than life. He looked like Blaine’s memory of him. Like the brother who didn’t return to Ohio.

Blaine pressed his lips to Sophia’s fair head.

“Finish your coffee, what are you dawdling for? Time’s a wasting. Let’s hit the town! Grab some food, see some sights. What do you say?”

His fingers remained as steady as his voice. “I have a child.”

“Call a babysitter!”

“It’s not that easy.” Blaine sat. “God, Cooper. You never change.”

Cooper said, “What?”

“It’s always about you.” A baby in his arms. A husband’s photo on a family shrine. A brother who he hadn’t seen in years. “You—”

Cooper was silent.

There was an echo in his voice; fifteen years ago, he had said the same words. “You didn’t even come to my wedding.”

“Is that what this is about?” Cooper’s face twisted. “You’re still mad?”

“No.” He ducked his head, struggled to find the words. “I was never mad about it.”

But he thought about Thad’s wedding, loud and raucous, with all of his friends and family around him. He thought about Wes’ wedding before that. Nick’s wedding, where Nick’s sister had cried even as she stood as a bridesmaid. Jeff’s uncle had interrupted Jeff’s father’s speech with an anecdote of his own of when Jeff was five and tried to do a backflip onto the thankfully carpeted floor. Beat’s brother had shared a story at Beat’s wedding of Beat diligently reciting “Boots and cats” over and over as a child until their mother had almost gone mad.

“I was never mad,” Blaine said, helplessly.

“You were fifteen and marrying a ghost!”

“I know,” Blaine said.

“I was in LA.”

“I know,” he said, again. “But you weren’t there.”

He was thirteen again, signing betrothal papers under his parents’ watchful gaze, and Cooper was in Los Angeles. He was fourteen, waking up in the hospital with a broken knee and broken ribs and broken shoulder, and Cooper hadn’t bothered to come home.

He was fifteen again, marrying Sebastian’s ghost—

Agarwood wafted across his nose. He was wearing white: the color of the lanterns that hung above them, the color of his mother’s wedding dress. Sebastian’s mouth quirked in the corner in the photograph on the altar.

Blaine’s parents stood across from Sebastian’s parents.

Cooper had stayed in Los Angeles.

In that moment, a terror had lurched within him: like the tide, suddenly creeping higher and higher until the water reached his chest, and Blaine’s fingers had clenched, as if to cling to anything that would bring him to shore.

Blaine said, to Cooper, “You weren’t there,” but he didn’t know if Cooper could hear through the water in his lungs.

  


* * *

  


He was lying in bed, Sophia beside him shoving everything she could reach into her mouth, when Cooper knocked.

“What now?”

Cooper stuck his head in. “Hey.”

Blaine tugged the edge of the duvet out of Sophia’s mouth, replacing it with the pacifier. She gurgled happily. “What do you want, Cooper?”

The curtains softened the sunlight as it slanted in through the window. Sophia’s hair gleamed in the light, soft and fair and so unlike Blaine’s or Cooper’s.

Cooper closed the door and leaned against it. “Do you remember when you were a kid?”

Blaine caught the pacifier as Sophia spat it out again. “And you made fun of everything I did?”

Cooper said, “You said that you wanted to perform.”

Blaine looked up. Cooper’s face was unusually grave. “What is this about?”

“Are you really okay with this?” He gestured, and Sophia’s focus swiveled from the blanket to Cooper. “Married to a ghost? A baby that isn’t even yours? What happened to Broadway? What happened to winning a Tony?”

Blaine said, “I was ten.” He tugged Sophia’s fist away from her mouth, replacing it with the pacifier again. “Things change.”

“They don’t change this much. You don’t just… throw away your life.”

“Well, you had plenty to say about those dreams when I was a kid.” He closed his eyes. “Maybe you were right, Cooper. . You always had a lot to say about everything I did wrong.”

Cooper said, “Is that what you think?”

Blaine opened his eyes.

Cooper hadn’t moved, his body unusually still. Between them, the narrow expanse between the edge of the bed and the doorway seemed to stretch, vast and boundryless.

“What am I supposed to think?” Blaine said. Sophia gurgled beside him. Her hands were so small, as she clenched them into tiny fists. Blaine’s hands imitated hers without conscious thought. “Why are you even here, Cooper? In New York? In my apartment? I thought you were happy in LA.”

“Happy?” he echoed. “Are you happy?”

Blaine looked up sharply. “Yes.”

“Really?” He gestured. “Married to a ghost? A baby that isn’t even yours? Not performing on stage?”

“Yes,” Blaine insisted. Sophia rolled onto her back. “Yes.”

Cooper said, “Alright.”

Sophia’s gaze fixated on Blaine, and Blaine said, hollowly, “I am happy.”

  


* * *

  


The sun was falling through the window, golden and warm across the dining table. Blaine tilted his sun up, to catch the last of the sun rays, the sound of clatter in the kitchen growing louder and louder.

“Pick one,” Sebastian’s voice said. 

Blaine turned.

Silhouetted by the setting sun, Sebastian offered a bouquet of forks in his fist. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, and behind him, the kitchen was unusually clean.

“Where’s Sophia?”

“Not here.”

“Why not?”

Sebastian said, “These are your dreams.” He was still holding the forks. “This is where we meet.”

He stood. Sebastian didn’t move; just watched as Blaine went to the window and stared out the window. Paris glowed, warm and vibrant. Inside the two-bedroom apartment that Blaine shared with his daughter, Sebastian offered a handful of forks, their tines casting flickers of reflected light across the dining room table.

“It’s Paris outside,” he said. “Is that my doing?”

Sebastian said, “It’s my memory.”

“Why isn’t it New York?”

“I’ve never lived there.”

Blaine turned back. Sebastian was perfectly still. His face remained amiable, as if locked in the expression of mild amusement that Blaine had first seen from him.

“You aren’t here,” Blaine said. “This is really a dream.”

“Is it?” His hand lowered. He joined Blaine at the window. Outside, the buildings shifted to resemble the Latin Quarter, the Seventh Arrondissement, the Tenth—over and over, until they blurred into a shiftless impression of buildings without distinct form. “Then where is your daughter?”

Blaine turned.

“Broadway,” Sebastian said, softly. “Your name in lights. And instead you have a four-month old and no husband.”

Blaine’s breath hitched. “What are you saying?”

Sebastian stepped away from the window; like a jigsaw puzzle, the planes and surfaces shifted and rearranged themselves to the buildings of Broadway, marquees jutting out from old brick walls, their panels illuminated by the setting sun.

“Broadway,” he said, again. “Your name in lights. A husband and no child.” He didn’t move. “Are you happy?”

  


* * *

  


His heart was pounding when he woke up. Sophia was still asleep, hands curled into tiny fists, mouth making quiet sucking sounds in her sleep. A thin stream of light illuminated the floor where the city lights had crept in from the cracks between the curtains.

Blaine stared down at his daughter and said nothing.

Broadway, Cooper had said. Broadway, Sebastian had said. Broadway, when he hadn’t thought about it in years.

He closed his eyes, and he was ten years old again, watching his first Broadway musical for the first time, the lights bright on the stage. He mouthed along with the lyrics, his feet tapping soundlessly even as he remained still and riveted in his seat. And at the end of the performance, as the performers took their bows, he rose to his feet, practically bouncing on the tips of his toes.

Broadway.

And then, after St. Ivers, after Sebastian, he’d put Broadway out of mind. He’d taken dreams of bright lights and a song in his throat, ground into dust like his bones, and built something new from it.

Maybe it was time to go back.

He unlocked his phone, staring at his background—one of all of the Warblers at the latest wedding, significant others at everybody’s side except for him—before he very slowly searched for tickets.

He turned off the screen before the page could load. Outside, the city slumbered, the windows dark with sleep, only a few storefront marquees flickering with their fluorescent lights.

Blaine closed his eyes.

  


* * *

  


Cooper was eating cereal when Blaine emerged from his room the next day. He looked up, but didn’t say anything. Blaine squeezed past him to peer into his fridge; he’d need to get groceries, especially if Cooper was staying any longer.

“How long are you staying?” Blaine forced himself to ask.

Cooper crunched, loudly, and for a moment, Blaine thought that he’d pretend that he didn’t hear, that he’d usurp Blaine in New York City as well as Ohio and Los Angeles and the Philippines and every single other location that they’d both been in.

He looked up, and Blaine was suddenly struck with how old the both of them had gotten. Cooper was thirty-six now; Blaine had a child. They were no longer children, vying for their parents’ attention.

“We’ll see.”

“What does that mean?” It took effort to temper his tone, to keep it mild instead of letting it snap the way he wanted it to. 

Cooper shrugged. “I’m on a break.”

Blaine buttered a slice of bread. “Don’t have some movie audition that you have to run off to?”

“No,” Cooper said, lightly, but he didn’t continue. 

For a while, they said nothing, just occupied the same space. It had been years since Blaine had lived with his brother. It had been years since they had shared the same space. After Blaine had gotten married, he had started spending more and more holidays with the Smythes. Cooper had stayed in Los Angeles.

Blaine stared down at the bread. The butter had been cold when he had tried to spread it, and it had torn up the soft bread and left crumbles in its wake. “Stay as long as you like,” he finally said.

Cooper paused, long enough that Blaine knew that he was trying to think of something to say, and then like a metronome, his teeth crunched down on the cereal once, twice, three times, four times.

He went to check on Sophia.

  


* * *

  


Cooper was a remarkably quiet house guest.

He’d gotten good at playing with Sophia, though he was useless at anything that involved more than making various faces at her and letting her grab at his hair. Blaine still dropped Sophia off at one of his aunts on the Smythe side before he went to work. Cooper spent his days wandering the city, though if he was networking or just taking the train in circles, Blaine didn’t know.

A week into Cooper’s visit, Blaine opened the ticketing app on his phone and searched for Broadway. There wasn’t much available, on this short notice, but it wasn’t holiday season, and some people had clearly had to cancel their tickets, with a pair of seats on the mezzanine for the newest revival of West Side Story.

He called an aunt—a cousin of Alexander Smythe’s who was always happy to watch Sophia—and arranged for her to come over, and then bought the tickets.

Cooper stared at the tickets when he printed them out. “What’s that?”

“West Side Story,” Blaine waved them in the air. “Thought you’d like to experience New York while you’re here.”

“Broadway?” Cooper raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah.” He looked down. “You coming?”

Cooper took a ticket. “You make good money in that hospital of yours, doncha,” in an atrocious accent that Blaine couldn’t even place. It sounded like one too many westerns gone wrong.

He said, “I’ve got a kid,” in an attempt to imitate the cadence of Cooper’s words, and as he did, it was like he was a child again, and they were playing pretend, Cooper choosing the movie star to imitate, and Blaine helplessly following along, pulled into his brother’s magnetism every time.

At the theatre, he expected Cooper to flirt outrageously with the girls sitting next to him, but he was remarkably sober as they found their seats and flipped through their programs. It was easy to get swept up in the song and dance, the excitement and energy, and when intermission came, Blaine sat back in his seat and heaved a long, satisfied sigh.

Cooper’s eyes were fixed on the curtain.

“Cooper?”

Cooper shuddered, as if coming awake. “So what did you think, Squirt?”

“Don’t call me that,” Blaine said, immediately. He stood to file out of the row. “You getting up?”

Cooper said, “Go ahead. I’ll stay here.”

Blaine was washing his hands in the restroom, absently glancing at himself and the exhaustion that had steadily etched its way across his face since Sophia’s adoption, when he realized that Cooper hadn’t said a word about his latest jobs, his auditions, his life. All he’d done, since his arrival at Blaine’s doorstep, was smile and laugh and joke, despite the identical exhaustion etched in his face.

All he’d done was act.

He took his seat; Cooper was reading the program. Somehow, in the years of separation, Cooper had grown old. There was a furrow etching its way across his brow, and fine lines had made their way into the corners of his eyes. He was as meticulous in his appearance as he always was, but he was thirty-six and Blaine’s memory had been superimposing Cooper at eighteen and all of the grudges those memories entailed this entire time.

“Hey,” Blaine said, even as the rest of the audience meandered their way back to their seats. “Let’s get something to eat after this.”

Cooper glanced at him. “Sure.”

  


* * *

  


The restaurant was crowded, but still more quiet than a bar; Blaine and Cooper split grilled onigiri and fried soft-shell crab, a basket of tempura, a bottle of sake.

Blaine picked up a piece of crab, “Hey—”

Cooper said, “So, your kid.”

“I don’t want to talk about my kid,” he said. He chewed, swallowed his pride, and said, “I want to talk about you.”

Cooper drank his sake.

“I haven’t talked to you in almost twenty years,” Blaine stared down at his plate. “I—I almost died, Coop.”

Cooper refilled his cup in the chatter of the restaurant and drank. “Yeah.”

“And you said you had an audition.”

“I didn’t.”

Blaine looked up.

Cooper stared at his empty cup. So quietly that it was almost drowned out by the other patrons, he said, “I didn’t have an audition, when you went to that dance.”

Blaine’s throat tightened. “Then why didn’t—”

“You weren’t a very big baby,” Cooper said, and he sounded like Cooper from twenty-five years ago, the earliest memories that Blaine had. “You fit in my arms. You followed me everywhere I went. You—”

Blaine closed his eyes. When Cooper sang, he wanted to join in. When Cooper danced, he wanted to follow. When Cooper spent hours avidly watching movies and imitating the way the actors walked, the way they talked, the way their faces contorted, Blaine wanted to do all the same things.

It had made Cooper’s stark absence worse.

“And I left,” he said, “and you almost died.” He poured, he drank. “How could I go back? I didn’t even have a good reason for leaving in the first place.”

“It was your dream,” Blaine said, mouth dry, suddenly thinking of Broadway, his name in lights, and the way Cooper looked at him.

Cooper said, “Yeah. Still is. That’s the worst part.”

Blaine picked up a piece of soft shell crab; there was no exoskeleton as he bit down, no defenses to protect itself. There was just the quiet realization of a long buried guilt.

Blaine said, “You are an actor.”

“A national credit rating commercial. A handful of minor roles on obscure shows.” He said, “And I didn’t go back when you were hospitalized.” He tossed back the last of his sake. “I didn’t go back when you got married to a ghost.” The cup clinked as he put it on the table. “I didn’t go back when you adopted a baby.”

Blaine stared at the remnants of the meal.

Cooper dropped several bills on the table. “I’m going to go for a walk.”

“Cooper—”

“I won’t wake the baby when I get back.”

  


* * *

  


He saw the door open before he heard it, from his spot on the couch. Sophia had already been asleep when he arrived; Sebastian’s Auntie Jasmine had been happy to have spent hours with her grandniece, and happier still to head home and to bed. Instead of going to bed himself, Blaine had found himself settled in a corner of the couch, able to see both the family shrine and the front door with only a tilt of his chin.

Cooper slipped in, one hand still tucked into his leather jacket—

He stopped short.

Blaine said, “Welcome home.”

Cooper closed the door, quietly, to keep Sophia from waking. “Did you stay up?” he asked.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Blaine said.

Cooper leaned against the door.

“When I was a kid,” Blaine said, “you were the coolest brother ever.”

He closed his eyes.

Blaine continued, “You were so cool. You were good at singing and good at dancing and you always had the best imitations.”

He snorted, briefly.

“I wanted to be you when I grew up.”

Cooper didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember, when we went to New York? I was just starting third grade—”

“We saw Phantom of the Opera,”

“—and you said you wanted to be an actor when you grew up,” Blaine closed his eyes, “And I didn’t tell you, but I thought, ‘I want to be an actor too, and Cooper and I can perform together for the rest of our lives.’”

Cooper said nothing.

Blaine said, “And then you left.”

And then he went with a boy to a dance, and then he had almost died, and then he had married his fiancé’s ghost.

“And you never came back.”

He said, “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

In the darkness, it was easy to confess his fears, to admit his wants. “I didn’t know if I wanted you to either.” He turned. There was a slice of iridescent light from the buildings outside that played across the glass pane before Sebastian’s face. “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

  


* * *

  


The next day, Cooper woke late. Blaine had fed and changed and was playing with Sophia on the living room floor when he emerged.

Cooper looked at them, somberly, and then said, “Good morning.” He crouched to meet Sophia’s gaze. “Hey, Squirt.”

Blaine opened his mouth instinctively, and then closed it.

Cooper looked at him, just briefly, and then said to Sophia, his voice light and lilting, “You’re going to break hearts just like your dad when you grow up, aren’t you?”

He kept his mouth closed around his sarcastic retort that Cooper didn’t know Sebastian. 

But then Cooper offered a finger. “I’m your Uncle Cooper,” he said, settling cross legged on the floor beside them. “And let me tell you about your dad,” he glanced at Blaine, and there was a dozen years of promise in it, “my baby brother, who’s always been the most talented guy I’ve ever known.” Sophia closed a hand around his offered finger, making a happy gurgle as she did so. “It’s lucky for all of us mortal actors that he went into music therapy instead of acting, because we’d all be out of jobs otherwise.”

Sophia said, “Da, da, da.” She beamed at Blaine.

Cooper smiled as well. “Yeah. That’s your dad.”

  


* * *

  


Cooper left a few weeks later, catching a red-eye flight back to LAX. Blaine and Sophia went to the airport to see him off. Cooper took Sophia from Blaine with practiced ease, giving her a sloppy kiss on the forehead as she immediately wound her fingers into his hair. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving,” he cooed at her, and he gave Blaine a contemplative look. “You’re going back to Ohio, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “Don’t be a stranger,” Blaine said as he took Sophia back. She cried, “Coo, Coo, Coo,” and reached for Cooper’s hair, again. 

Cooper shrugged.

Blaine shifted Sophia in his arms. “You aren’t a bad brother,” he said, finally. “And you aren’t a bad actor.” He untangled one of Sophia’s hands from his hair before she could pull. “And one day, I’ll turn on the TV and there you’ll be, in the lead role.”

Cooper studied him, as if looking for any hint of facetiousness.

Blaine looked away, smiling wryly at Sophia. “I’ve always admired you,” he said. “And I will, even if it’s to point you out when a commercial comes on.”

“Coo,” Sophia called again.

“I believe in you,” Blaine said, and it was freeing to say it without the years of resentment pressing on him, like a breath of air after he had been drowning.

Cooper tugged the two of them into an open-armed embrace. “I believe in you. You’re doing good with those kids,” he said. “You’re doing good with this kid.” He gave Sophia a loud smacking kiss, and she giggled in delight.

They waved as Cooper made his way through TSA, and when he was out of sight, Blaine and Sophia turned around and headed back: to home; to Sebastian; to new dreams and new hopes and a future waiting to be seen.


	3. 富

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Have you considered private school?" Alexander Smythe asks, and Blaine wonders about the value he brings. Some decisions are not meant to be made in fear.

Summers in Ohio were hot and muggy—even under the awning of the porch, Blaine could feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck. Sophia didn’t seem to notice, running around in the backyard of her grandfather’s house, splashing in the kiddie pool that had been set up. Alexander Smythe handed Blaine a glass of lemonade from where they sat on the porch.

“She’s growing up fast,” Sebastian’s father said.

Blaine curled a grateful hand around the condensation of the glass. “I guess,” he said. Watching Sophia grow, day by day, it didn’t feel fast. But Alexander Smythe saw Sophia every few months when they went back to Ohio or he visited New York. For him, watching Sophia grow in a series of freeze-frames, Sophia probably did seem to be growing quickly. “She’s starting kindergarten in a few months.”

“I heard.” He said, very seriously, “Albert mentioned that you’ve enrolled her in the local kindergarten.”

“Yeah,” Blaine said. 

“Have you considered private school?”

Blaine’s fingers tightened on the glass.

Sebastian’s father said, very steadily, “Children can be cruel, especially when they’re confronted with things they don’t understand.”

His breath hitched. “Because _I_ married Sebastian’s ghost.”

Sophia kicked her bare feet in the water, sending droplets splashing into the air.

“If money is an issue,” Sebastian’s father began.

“It’s not about the money,” he interrupted. Sophia turned, her face bright with joy. Every day, her face grew more and more Smythe-like, more and more like Sebastian. She looked nothing like Blaine.

Sebastian’s father drained his glass. “Think about it.” He turned to his granddaughter. His voice was light as he called, “Are you having fun, Sophia?”

Sophia giggled back. “Yup! Are you coming to play?”

“I’ll be right there.” To Blaine, he said, “I only want the best for her.”

“I know,” he said.

  


* * *

  


Blaine was dreaming.

The ocean stretched out before him, shimmering silver under the summer sun. Sophia, still so small, was giggling as she scooped up sand in buckets and them dumped them out in spiraling towers. Sebastian was kneeling beside her, his adult hands holding the plastic bucket steady as she tapped it to loosen the sand, and then helping her lift it straight up without disrupting the sand.

Sophia giggled, shrill, and Sebastian murmured something back, the sound of it lost within the dull roar of the waves.

She toddled towards the ocean again, to scoop up another bucket of damp sand, and Sebastian stood to trail behind her in case she needed any help, a bucket of his own in hand. She squealed in delight as the sea foamed around her toes, and Sebastian threw back his head in delight as he scooped her up, twirling her around while she laughed and shouted, “Down! Down, Papa! The bucket is going away!”

And it was—the red bucket she had been using to scoop the sand had been caught by the tides, and it bobbed along the currents as it drifted out into the sea.

Blaine was dreaming; he knew this, with utter clarity, because Sebastian and Sophia had never met.

Sebastian lifted her higher, and her screech of delight cut through the heartbeat of the tides.

Sebastian had never met their daughter. He never would, not unless Sophia died, and now Blaine truly understood his parents’ terror all those years ago. Sebastian would never meet Sophia, only seeing her through the filtered lens of Blaine’s dreams. Sophia would never meet Sebastian, growing up with only photos, the latest from when Sebastian was still fifteen years old, his cheeks still soft from childhood, his jaw only beginning to take on its stubborn cast. 

In the dream, Sebastian embraced their daughter close and pressed a kiss to her soft, fair hair. His eyes were closed, and his mouth curved into an impossibly fond smile as the tide swept in and out again. They looked like father and daughter, identical casts to their face despite their age difference.

Out on the ocean, the red bucket bobbed away, and Blaine woke.

  


* * *

  


For the past eight years, Blaine had been working at the same place in Mt. Sinai Hospital as a music therapist. It was the culmination of a stray comment he had made once, drunk at a Warbler party, hanging off of Thad’s shoulders, since Thad was the only one in the lot short enough to have shoulders at a reasonable height for Blaine to hang off of.

“I just want to make art and help people,” he had slurred.

“Sure, Smythe.” Thad had dumped him onto a couch before finding him a water bottle. “Drink this and we’ll talk.”

He had downed the water, slept the worst of the drunkenness off, and gotten dragged to his college counselor the next day to make an appointment on how to make art and help people. He’d left with a plethora of ideas, but after post-junior year college tours, he had settled on being a music therapist. 

He liked his work, for the most part. He liked his patients. He liked using music to help them. He liked watching them progress and improve. For all that Cooper had dredged up old dreams of Broadway, the allure of bright lights had damped as the years of music therapy passed by. There was value in being needed, that working in the hospital offered.

Being a music therapist paid well enough. With both the Smythes and his own parents behind him, Blaine had never worried for money. Alexander Smythe was prone to spoiling the granddaughter he hadn’t thought he’d have, Sebastian’s mother Isabella doted on Sophia, and Blaine’s own parents were happy to spoil their only grandchild. Blaine covered the necessities with his paycheck, and his family—parents, aunts, uncles, cousins—were happy to offer their assistance whenever and wherever.

_Have you considered private school?_

Blaine was familiar with the cruelty of children. 

_Really? You believe in ghosts and all of that? This is the 21st century._

Private school wouldn’t protect Sophia from the cruelty of children. Blaine was familiar enough with how it could creep, insidious, through the cracks of time-honored institutions. But perhaps here, in New York, Sophia would have the safety that Blaine had not been able to avoid.

  


* * *

  


“I didn’t know you were thinking of sending Sophia to private school,” his mother said.

“Alexander suggested it.” Blaine shifted the phone from one hand to the other.

She hummed, thoughtfully. “You should have told us.”

“I did tell you,” Blaine pointed out. His mother had called him when he was on his lunch break in response to his text earlier this morning. He adjusted his phone again, needing both hands temporarily to balance the Tupperware on his lap, before taking another bite of his packed pasta. The last dregs of summer left a sticky humidity across his skin. “It’s too late for this year anyways.”

Sophia would start at the local kindergarten in two weeks. She had already picked out a new backpack (dinosaur patterned) and new sneakers (with lights embedded in the shoebed). She was understandably excited, and had spent the entire morning walk to daycare stomping her feet vigorously on the pavement to share the fact that her shoes _lit up_ to all of the other commuters. 

Blaine had held her hand the entire walk and thought about private school.

Smaller class sizes. Smaller teacher-student ratios. Better classroom funding. New textbooks. Clean carpets. Fresh paint on the walls. Blazers and slacks. Dress-shirts and ties. Expectations, and the endless chasm when drying to meet them.

“We can pay for it,” his mother was saying. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“It’s not about the money,” he said. He dropped his fork into his leftovers, appetite gone. “It’s—”

He had grown up in the wild exuberance of public schools; in elementary school, they had rolled around the playground, laughing and squealing in unabandoned joy during their recess time, climbing the single jungle gym and playing freeze-tag; in middle school they had jostled each other for the least squeaky desk, jostling each other as the teacher set up the projector, giggling whenever they talked about balls in science class; in high school—

His mother was quiet for a moment. “We sent you to Dalton,” she finally said.

“Yeah. I know. Alexander recommended it, right?”

“Yes.” A pause. “Blaine.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you like it there?”

His first month at Dalton, he had barely eaten anything, listless and uncertain why. It had been his second attempt at ninth grade, his second attempt at high school, his second attempt—

He had filled his mornings with physical therapy. He had filled his days with school work. He had filled his nights with exhausted sleep. When he finally did audition for the Warblers, it had been at the school counselors’ urging.

And then he had gone home for the weekend and learned that Sebastian had died.

“Yeah,” he said. Dalton had brought him Wes and Nick and Jeff and Thad and Trent and Beat and all of the other Warblers. The structure of the coursework and rehearsals had given him the foundations to build his new life. The single room with a shrine tucked in the corner had the cornerstone of the house he lived in for four years. “It was nice.”

Dalton had given him Sebastian.

If he had stayed at St. Ivers; if he had gone to a different school—any school other than Dalton, with its bulwark of tradition, with Wes preparing to inherit a slew of temples across the midwest, with Thad’s staunch traditionality—

If.

“After your first year at Dalton,” his mother was saying, “I wondered if sending you to Dalton was the right thing. I wondered if sending you to St. Ivers was the right decision.”

“Yeah?”

“You will never know,” his mother said, her voice tight over the connection. “You will never be able to turn back time.”

His hand tightened on the phone. “It wasn’t your fault.”

But his mother said, “Dalton kept you safe.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia started kindergarten.

Blaine dropped her off, took a moment to visit her classroom and greet her teacher—a dimpled Mr. James, who shook his hand and didn’t ask about a Mrs. Smythe—and then headed home.

Sebastian smiled back from the shrine.

Blaine sat before the shrine, a stick of incense burning in his hands. He had already made his prayers to his ancestors: for good fortune, that Sophia would make friends, that her teachers and classmates understand her circumstances. He didn’t pray this time.

“She’s starting school now,” he said.

Sebastian didn’t reply.

“Kindergarten,” he said, studying the photo. “She just started today.”

The oldest Sebastian had ever been photographed had been fifteen years old, in a selfie recovered off of his phone. There had been a smirk curving the corner of his mouth, though his eyes had been flat above it. His collar had been crooked. It had been taken the same evening Sebastian had died.

Blaine’s photo of Sebastian was more formal, posed, smile careful. His mouth curved into a careful smile, his eyes neutral, his hair swept back carefully.

Sebastian had gone to private schools his entire life. When he was still living in the US, he had attended private elementary school—there were photos of him, his hair not yet darkened into brunette, but combed with a neat part, dressed in a navy polo and khakis. When he had moved to Paris with his mother, he had been enrolled in international school, where he had been given a plethora of coursework and extracurriculars to occupy his time.

He closed his eyes and inhaled, deeply.

“Your father suggested private school,” he finally said. 

He hadn’t been able to bring it up; a month had passed, and then two. If Sebastian knew what Blaine was agonizing over, then he hadn’t brought it up in intermittent dreams. His dreams with Sebastian had been few and far between in the past few months—he was more wont to dream of Sebastian than with him. When he did find Sebastian—not a facsimile of him conjured by hopes and wishes—he had found himself unable to bring up Sophia. It had felt like rubbing salt in the sound that was Sebastian’s presence, or lack thereof.

So Blaine hadn’t said anything, and Sebastian had never brought up the subject of the daughter that Blaine had adopted in Sebastian’s name.

Agarwood reminded him of his year in the realm of the dead, of the Smythe house in Columbus, of empty mist, of a vast expanse and a tower in the distance.

“I should have mentioned it—to you,” he murmured. The smoke drifted in narrow trails towards the ceiling. “I should have asked you. She’s your daughter too.”

If Sebastian _cared_.

He could see Sebastian in Sophia already. In a few years, her hair would darken like Sebastian’s had, her face would slough the last of the baby fat and the Smythe cheekbones would make their way into prominence. In a few years, Blaine would stop seeing himself in the vestiges of round cheeks and big eyes: the uniformity of childhood. In a few years, Blaine would look at Sophia and only see Sebastian.

And if she went to private school—

“It’s not about the money,” he said. “My parents, and your parents. They’re all willing to pay the tuition. I could pay it, if necessary.” The tuition, the uniforms, the books, the extracurriculars: they could cover it all; money wasn’t the objection.

“You’ve only been to private schools,” he said. “Would you want to send Sophia to private school?”

Already, each year, Sophia looked less and less like she could be his daughter. How would private school accelerate that?

He stood. The incense was burning down in his hand. He stuck it into the sand. Sebastian smirked back at him.

“She’s your daughter,” he said, as steady as the stick in the sand. “You should maybe pay her a visit.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia liked kindergarten very much. She enthusiastically stomped her feet on the pavement the entire walk back to their apartment, extolling the virtues of the chairs (red, her favorite color for the day), the kindness of Mr. James (he smiled a lot), and describing all of the friends she made (Cynthia from daycare was in her class, and she had also made friends with Sue-who-had-just-lost-a-tooth and Annie-with-dinosaur-barrettes).

The shoes twinkled with each step, as bright as the marquee lights in the twilight. She hopped a few times, just to watch them flash.

Blaine paused. “How about we get dinner out today,” he suggested. “Celebrate your first day of kindergarten?”

She peered up at him. “Can I get chocolate chip pancakes?” she asked shrewdly.

“We can go to a diner,” Blaine agreed.

The waitress smiled indulgently at them as Sophia very cheerfully asked for chocolate chip pancakes. Blaine, in an attempt at nutrition, also asked for a side of eggs and a side of cut fruits for her.

“And you?” the waitress—Casey—asked him.

He ordered a burger.

“Is your wife joining you later?” Casey asked as she collected the menus. 

“Papa’s dead,” Sophia said blithely before Blaine could respond. “Daddy married his ghost.”

The waitress froze, just for a moment, before smiling at Sophia. “Oh?”

Sophia nodded, her pigtails bouncing. Blaine had never thought to hide the circumstances of his marriage with Sebastian from their daughter. She continued, “They had a bee-throw-all,” she said, enunciating the syllables carefully. “And when Papa died Daddy decided to marry his ghost.”

Casey glanced at Blaine, as if expecting him to contradict his daughter’s fantastical stories. But it was all true, if truncated, and Blaine had nothing to respond with beyond a strained smile.

“Your daughter has an active imagination,” she said. “I’ll get those drinks out for you guys, alright?”

“And pancakes!” Sophia chirped.

“And your pancakes.” She smiled at Sophia again, before heading over to put their orders into the kitchen.

Sophia turned back to her father. “She didn’t believe me,” she said, keenly.

Blaine said, “No.”

“Why not?”

He arranged the words carefully, one after another. “There are people who follow different traditions.”

“They don’t marry ghosts?”

“No.”

She thought about this, her head cocked to the side. She had picked it up from Blaine’s mother. “Why not?”

A chuckle lodged itself in Blaine’s throat. “Well,” he began, “some people don’t believe that ghosts exist.”

“But you see Papa in your dreams,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. Do you remember why?”

“You visited Papa in the land of the dead,” she recited obediently. “It was very dangerous, and you could have died.”

“That’s right.”

Sophia’s head tilted to the other side, like a bird. “I don’t see Papa in my dreams,” she said.

“I know,” Blaine said. “That’s okay.”

“I want to,” she said. “Cynthia sees her Mom and Dad every day. But I don’t ever see Papa.”

Blaine paused. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, flipping to the camera and holding it before her. “Here,” he said, holding it before her.

Sophia looked into the screen, green eyes and pale hair, brows pinching together in an expression eerily like Sebastian’s.

“You both have the same color eyes,” Blaine explained, very simply, because Sophia and Sebastian shared Smythe eyes. “And sometimes he makes the same face you’re making now.”

“I’m not making a face,” Sophia protested.

Blaine laughed. “Just a little,” he said. He reached over and touched a finger to the space between her brows. “This part gets all crinkly when he thinks, just like you.”

She looked up at him, and then back at the phone.

“That’s not seeing Papa.” She handed back the phone, five-and-a-half and already pedantic enough to find the flaws in Blaine’s proposal. “Why don’t I dream about Papa?”

He opened his mouth, and then closed it as a waitress—not Cindy—approached with Sophia’s pancakes. Blaine slid the phone into his pocket as she dug into them with relish, conversation forgotten in the face of chocolate chip pancakes for dinner.

Blaine propped his chin in a hand, watching Sophia eat. The conversation was not as easily forgotten for him.

  


* * *

  


Blaine opened his eyes. Sophia was chattering, bright and happy, in the kitchen, the sounds indistinct. There was an answering murmur, something low, with laughter in the voice.

The blankets on the bed were rumpled. He touched where a divot had been etched by another body—still warm. 

Hope and terror twisted, shapeless and formless, as he untangled himself from the sheets. The blinds were drawn, casting the bedroom of his New York apartment in shadow, but even so, the edges of the room seemed blurry and indistinct.

This was a dream.

Sophia’s voice rose, high and chattering. There was the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen, cutlery rattling, ceramic clinking against each other.

Blaine pushed open the door.

Without the heavy wood in the way, he could hear more clearly. “I can do it,” Sophia was insisting. “I’m five-and-a-half, I’m a big girl.”

“You are,” Sebastian’s voice agreed. “Be careful with those plates.”

“Yes, Papa.” She sounded as put-upon as she did when Blaine warned her. “I know.”

“Such sass from you.” There was laughter in his voice. “Where did you learn that from?”

“From you!”

“From me?”

“Daddy says so.” There was a pause. Blaine padded down the hallway, lest he disturb the two of them. “Daddy’s always right.”

“Is he? Even when he’s wrong?”

“Even when he’s wrong!”

Sebastian laughed. “Alright, Sophie.”

“My name is Sophia,” she said, very seriously. Blaine paused in the entryway. The table had been set, the cutlery lying crooked on napkins that had been inexpertly folded. Sebastian was facing the stove, tending to something fragrant and steaming. Sophia had clambered onto a chair, and was straightening one of the place settings, brow furrowed.

“Sophia,” Sebastian said. He was smiling, the syllables warm in his mouth. “Do you know what Sophia means?”

She looked up. “What?”

“It means wise. Do you know what wise means?”

She said nothing. Her mouth opened, and shut, but there was no sound.

Blaine stepped forward. “Sophia?” 

Sebastian turned. He tracked Blaine’s movement, but he didn’t move from his place by the stove. The pot of soup rattled, a roiling boil bubbling and bubbling and bubbling—

Sophia looked up at him. Her mouth widened in a rictus of joy. She said nothing, her face frozen—

Like a family portrait, caught in a single moment in time. Blaine blinked, rapidly, and from the corner of his vision, the edges crinkled, curled; the pigment faded to the sepia of faded photos; the edges of Sophia’s smile cracked.

He reached forward, but she was never there.

Sebastian turned. “Dinner’s ready.” He wasn’t smiling.

He said, “Where did Sophia go?”

His husband shrugged. “Wherever your dreams went.”

Blaine sagged into his chair. “What does that even mean?”

“You didn’t think she was actually here, did you?”

“She was talking to you.”

“Yeah,” Sebastian drawled. “My point exactly.” He didn’t say the words, but Blaine could hear them: _you think that we would talk to each other?_

Blaine swallowed. 

“Too alive to visit her dead Pops,” Sebastian continued. He stirred the pot, and as if unpaused, it resumed its bubbling. “All dead and alone.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Say what? That I’m dead?”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that.” Like he didn’t light incense every day. Like he didn’t leave roses on the shrine. Like he didn’t dream of agarwood.

Sebastian stared back. His chin tipped up. His mouth pressed flat.

The autumn light should have cast its golden glow across his skin, but instead he looked thin, as if he were barely there. Blaine had grown used to a family within these walls, and his waking moments never included Sebastian except as a static picture on the shrine, immortalized at fifteen.

Blaine didn’t look away. “Yeah,” he said, after a long silence. “You are dead.” In his peripheral vision, the counters lurched. “You died, and left me alone to raise our daughter by myself.” 

Sebastian opened his mouth.

“You left me to raise your daughter,” he continued, but the words sounded strange in his mouth.

“My daughter?” he scoffed, “I don’t even know her.”

He thought of Sophia’s smiling face. “She looks just like you.”

“And how would I know that, Blaine?” He turned away. He took the pot off the stove. The gas griddle was empty and cold. He set it on the table, brushing past Blaine as if he weren’t there.

He swallowed. “How would you know?” he repeated.

Sebastian sat at the table set for two. He paused, and then he said, “We don’t have a daughter, here.”

Blaine didn’t sit. “Of course we do,” he said. “Our lives aren’t contained in the realm of the dead.” He looked up. “We aren’t just dreams.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia studied the bird with unnerving calm. It was pink, plucked, raw. “What are you doing now?”

Albert, who was in charge of the turkey for Thanksgiving, smiled over at Sophia, who had planted herself on one of the barstools at the island earlier that day, coloring book in hand, and had yet to move. “We’re preparing the turkey for Thanksgiving.”

“It looks funny.”

Albert laughed. He was rubbing the skin with butter. “That’s because it’s raw. We’ve got to cook it, by putting it into the oven.”

She studied the oven—“Careful, it’s hot; there’s a little fire burning inside,” Albert warned—and then the bird. “Will Papa get to eat it?” she finally asked.

“Sebastian?” Albert glanced at Blaine, and then back towards Sophia. “Why do you ask that?”

“When we burn things,” Sophia said, “they go to Papa in the ghost world. And there’s a fire in the oven. So the turkey can go to Papa and he can also have some.”

Albert took a deep breath. “That’s very clever of you,” he said. “We’ll leave some on the shrine for your Papa, alright?”

“Okay.” She kicked her ankles, sufficiently satisfied, as Albert continued his preparations with the turkey. She resumed her coloring as Albert continued his work, and Blaine slipped from where he had been standing in the doorway of the kitchen, back to the family room where cousins and aunts and uncles were gathered.

Alexander looked up as Blaine slipped in. “Sophia still in the kitchen?”

“She’s very into the turkey,” Blaine replied.

As the years passed, more and more Smythes seemed to forget that Sophia was once Alyssa’s daughter. Alyssa herself seemed to prefer to ignore Sophia, treating her in the same way she treated her other nieces and nephews. Sophia had been told, early on, that she had been adopted from an aunt, but she had yet to comprehend, exactly, what that meant.

“How’s her first year of school?” A cousin asked. Blaine was happy to take a seat, glass of wine in one hand, and pull out his phone to show his collection of photos of Sophia. The Smythes were always happy to get updates on how Sophia was doing, and Blaine cycled through her arts and crafts projects, the science projects, a photo of her beaming with her front tooth missing. Photo after photo, cycling back days, weeks, months—

Years.

“You must be so proud,” an aunt murmured to Alexander Smythe.

Blaine didn’t look up from his phone. He felt his father-in-law’s gaze on the back of his head. 

He said, “Yes.”

  


* * *

  


At night, the house was quiet, hollowed out after the festivities. Blaine stood in front of the shrine, a photo of Sebastian in a place of prominence in the center.

The light down the hallway clicked on. There was the sound of padding footsteps, and then Albert Smythe stood there. “Blaine,” Albert said.

Blaine turned. “Sebastian should be here.”

Decades ago now, Sebastian’s photo had made its way to the family shrine, and it had yet to move from its place of honor. Other relatives faded into the background, one after another, but Sebastian remained: Alexander’s son, Blaine’s husband.

Albert said, “Yes.”

Blaine’s hands flexed.

Albert stood before the shrine. The light cast beams across the glass of the photograph.

They stood, side by side, in silence. “Sebastian was fifteen,” Albert said. “He had decades left to live. He should be here.”

Blaine closed his eyes.

“But it doesn’t mean that you don’t belong here.”

Blaine turned.

Albert said, “You’re a Smythe, Blaine.”

“Am I?” Blaine asked, softly. “I’ve never even met Sebastian.”

Albert’s shoulder nudged his. “You’re Sophia’s father.”

Blaine closed his eyes. Sebastian’s words, his steady rejection of the daughter he had never met, echoed. “He’s never even met her.”

“But you have.” Albert said, steadily, “You’ve been living here since you were fifteen. You’ve lived here for longer than Sebastian, at this point. You belong here, Blaine. You’re allowed to be here without grief, Blaine.”

Blaine didn’t shake his head. He didn’t say anything. Albert stood next to him in silence, the two of them watching the smoke from the incense curl towards the ceiling, fragrant and heavy with waiting.

  


* * *

  


New York in December was cold, and each morning, Blaine took longer and longer, bundling scarves and jackets and hats.

“It’s not that cold,” Sophia declared, six years old and already knowing better than her father.

“It’s pretty cold,” Blaine responded.

Sophia gave him a look, something so flat and sardonic that for a moment Blaine thought he was seeing Sebastian’s expressions. But the expression was strange, on Sophia’s features. She let him adjust the hat on her pale hair, and only sighed once as he adjusted the scarf again, finding himself reluctant to let go.

She slid her mittened hand into his as they headed outside. “It’s okay, Daddy,” she said.

“What’s okay? The cold? It’s not that bad, I guess.”

“No.” She giggled. “Being with you.”

“Being with me?”

“Yeah.” She swung their hands vigorously, plowing forward. “I like being with you, Daddy. And next time, we’ll be with Papa too. That’s what Uncle Albert says.”

Blaine stared down at her small hand in his. “What did Uncle Albert say?”

“That Papa left us before I was born, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know him.” She looked back at him, and laughed. “Uncle Albert said that in our past lives, maybe I was his Auntie and he was a kid!”

“Yeah,” Blaine said. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. And in our next life, and the one after that, and the one after that,” she said, continuing forward. “Papa will join us in those. And we’ll all be happy together.”

He swallowed, throat tight. “Yeah.”

  


* * *

  


Sebastian was sitting on the edge of the bed, fiddling with his phone, when Blaine returned to his dreams.

“Sebastian,” Blaine said.

He didn’t look up.

Blaine sat next to Sebastian—close enough to touch, if they wanted to. But he didn’t move any closer. He could feel Sebastian’s breaths, could feel the heat permeating from his skin—as if he had just emerged from the shower, steam still misting the air.

He didn’t take his own phone from his pocket. Instead, he just sat there, hands open in his lap, Sebastian beside him—just the two of them, side by side.

“I didn’t choose this,” Sebastian said, finally.

“I know.”

“I didn’t choose any of this.”

He closed his eyes. “I know.”

“What do I know about raising a kid? I died when I was fifteen. I was getting drunk and walking into cars.”

“I know.”

“She’s asking about me,” Sebastian tilted his head back. “She prays at the shrine, even when you’re not there.”

Blaine turned.

He was staring at the ceiling, his mouth twisted. “She’s six.”

“She is.”

“That’s pretty young to untie her soul.”

Clarity unfolded, piece by piece. “That’s what this is about,” Blaine realized. “You’re scared.”

Sebastian looked away.

“She’s not—she’s not untying her soul, Sebastian.”

“Just like you didn’t?”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “Don’t make this about me. Hey.” He pressed his hand on Sebastian’s thigh. “Look at me.”

Sebastian turned.

He could see Sophia in Sebastian’s face—the same shaped eyes, their cheeks—but there was something unfamiliar between Sebastian and Sophia. Something about Sebastian’s fear, the twist in his mouth, was different from Sophia’s.

Blaine said, “She’s not untying her soul.”

Sebastian studied his face. “And how do you know that, Blaine?”

“Because she doesn’t need to.” And, as he said the words, he knew they were true. “She believes you love her, even if you don’t. She thinks you’re with her, even when you’re not.”

Sebastian turned away.

Blaine reached up. Sebastian’s cheek was warm, as he cupped it in his hand, turned Sebastian, and studied his features. He really didn’t look anything like Sophia, when she was being mulish and stubborn. He didn’t even look like Sophia, when she was scared.

Realization crept in from the corners of his mind.

Sebastian said, “She’s too much like you.” He raised a hand of his own, pressed it against Blaine’s on his cheek. “When she’s stubborn, her face tenses just like yours. Her mouth presses flat, like yours, right now.”

Blaine forced his jaw to loosen.

“And you, Blaine.” He twisted his fingers with Blaine’s. “You. You, who followed me when I ran. You, who has always been loose with your soul.”

Blaine said, for lack of anything else, “She’s your daughter.”

“Your daughter,” Sebastian corrected. He squeezed. “You’re right, Blaine. I am scared.”

“Sebastian—”

“You were willing to die, if it meant finding me. How much is Sophia like you?”

“She’s a Smythe,” Blaine protested.

“And aren’t you?”

Blaine fell silent.

“She’s just like you,” he said. “Your heart. Your love. Your passion and determination and willingness to do the right thing.”

He swallowed.

“How could I not love her?”

And Sebastian had run, when he realized he loved Blaine. And Blaine had followed him into the realm of the dead. And when Sebastian had realized he loved Sophia; Sophia who was so much like Blaine—

“You don’t have to run,” Blaine said. He shifted, so that their thighs were touching. They sat, side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, thigh-to-thigh. Blaine rested their hands together in Sebastian’s lap. “Sebastian…” He took a deep breath. “I’m scared too, you know. All the time. About raising Sophia alone. About doing the wrong thing.”

Sebastian’s hand squeezed his. “I know that now.”

“That you don’t have to run?”

“Yeah. I mean, what good does it do? You married me even when I died. You hunted me down in the realm of the dead. Running’s useless when you’re involved.”

“I’m being serious.”

Sebastian sobered. “Alright. This is a serious conversation then. You found me. You married me. When you set your mind to it, Blaine, you can do anything. And that includes raising our daughter.”

Blaine rested his head on Sebastian’s shoulder.

“She’s not here,” Sebastian said, but this time there was no malice. Perhaps there had never been any malice, just fear and relief poorly hidden. “And I’m glad she isn’t.” He brought a hand to Blaine’s curls. “It means she’s alive. It means she has a lifetime to grow. A lifetime to be just like you.”

Blaine snorted. “Like me?”

“Like you,” Sebastian agreed, without guile. “Generous and kind. Ambitious and determined. Someone to admire.” His mouth curved into a smirk. “Except maybe without the whole marrying a ghost thing and untethering the soul and chasing husbands into the realm of the dead.”

“Hey! You should be more grateful.”

“I am.” Sebastian bowed over him. “But one in the family’s enough for me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

  


* * *

  


Alexander said, over the phone, “I was surprised to get your email earlier today.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Blaine said, as he stirred the soup on the stove, a hearty beef brisket for the winter evenings. “It’s been months, but I wanted to start talking about private schools for Sophia.”

“I was surprised that you had decided to go for it,” Alexander corrected, not unkindly. “I was under the impression that you wanted Sophia to attend public school.”

Blaine sucked in a breath. “I thought about it,” he said. “Well, I spent a long time thinking about it.”

Alexander made a mildly affirming noise.

“If the offer’s still open,” Blaine said, “I want to give Sophia the choice.”

“She’s six,” Alexander said, mildly. He didn’t seem to be disagreeing, just making a statement.

“I know,” Blaine cradled the phone to his ear. “She likes her teacher and her friends. I don’t want to take that from her. But I want her to know… I wanted her to know that she’s part of this family, and maybe private school’s the way to do that.”

“You don’t need to send her to private school for that,” Alexander said. Thankfully, he wasn’t laughing. Perhaps he understood what Blaine had been contemplating. “She knows that she’ll always be part of this family.” 

Blaine took a breath, but before he could speak, Alexander continued.

“She’s your daughter, after all.”


	4. 康寧

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Change is inevitable. Blaine returns to Ohio to attend the Warbler reunion, and is confronted with more change than he expected.

“So how’s Westerville?”

There was the crinkle of shrink wrap on the other side of the phone, a squeal of Styrofoam that made Blaine wince despite the distance, and then Wes said, “It’s fine,” in tones of remarkable calm, despite the creshendoing murmurs in the background. “Different. But fine. You’ll see when you’re back.”

Blaine shook his head. “Even Ohio changes.”

“Well, it’s been a while since you’ve been back.”

He laughed. “Just a year, huh?”

“Oh hush.” Wes laughed back.

It had been at least three years since Wes had moved back to Ohio—first to take over his family’s shrine in Westerville, and then to start managing one of the many businesses his family owned. Each year marked only by Sophia’s school breaks: winter and summer, one year had passed, and then another, and before Blaine had fully realized it, Sophia was staring middle school and Wes was settled in Ohio with no plans to return to New York.

Blaine had stayed in New York City, found his job in Mt. Sinai Hospital as a music therapist, and settled, along with the handful of Warblers who had also moved. Before Wes had moved back to Ohio, he had joined them in monthly brunch meetings and the occasional night out at a bar. After Wes had moved, they had made an attempt to keep meeting up, but despite Thad’s organizational prowess, the monthly brunches had been delayed and delayed until they had eventually stopped.

Blaine still met up with Nick and Thad, once in a blue moon. They were busy, the three of them. But the massive brunches of the past, which Wes had primarily organized, had faded into the background. Nick had his family, Thad had his, and Blaine had Sophia.

Everything was changing, and Blaine was helpless against its torrent.

“You’re coming back for the reunion, aren’t you?”

Blaine paused. “That’s this year?”

Wes replied, “The Warbler Reunion? Every five years, on the dot.” He laughed. “Time really flies, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever perform in one of them?”

“My year was right between reunions,” Blaine said. His first Warbler reunion had been during his freshman year of college. There had been something bittersweet about watching the Warblers perform from the audience. 

“That’s right. I performed during my sophomore year.”

Blaine made a vaguely affirmative noise.

“You didn’t go to the last one.”

“I was busy.”

“Or the one before that,” he observed. “When’s the last one you went to?”

“When I was doing my masters.”

“It’s been a while.”

Blaine’s fingers clenched on the phone. “Yeah.” Once everybody had started getting married and having kids of their own, Blaine had found it harder and harder to keep in contact beyond wedding after wedding, seeing his friends move on from their time together. Even if they didn’t come with their wives and husbands, they seemed divorced from the boys that he had once spent all of his waking hours with.

“You coming to this one?”

He hesitated.

“They’re not that bad,” Wes said into the silence. “There’s snacks, the Warblers perform a few songs, and everybody relives their glory days. And I know that Thad’ll be there.”

“He’s going?”

“That’s what he told me a few days ago.” There was a briefly muffled scuffle in the background, and then Wes said, “So, should I expect to see you in two months?”

He swallowed. Dalton, Westerville, Ohio. Ever since Sophia had come into his life, he hadn’t been back except for family vacations. Certainly, he had never gone back to Dalton. 

Blaine closed his eyes. 

“Blaine?”

He stared out the window. New York City bustled before him. “Of course. I’ll be there.”

  


* * *

  


“Seriously? Ohio?”

“I thought you liked Ohio,” Blaine said. Sophia was in her teens now, and while all the rumors of difficult teenagers wasn’t quite applicable to Sophia, she had recently picked up an annoying tendency to disagree for the sake of disagreement. “You like visiting your grandfather.”

“Yeah, but that means Ohio.” She scowled. “Can’t I stay here?”

Blaine didn’t sigh back. “It’s just for one weekend, Sophia.”

“So that means that staying here shouldn’t be that big of a deal.” She tossed herself onto the couch, more dramatically than a visit to Westerville, Ohio, truly entailed. “Right, Dad?”

Blaine shook his head. “Nice try. No.”

“I can stay with Auntie Jasmine.”

“You are not staying with Auntie Jasmine,” Blaine replied. Jasmine Smythe was one of Alexander Smythe’s cousins, and had spent many hours of Sophia’s childhood watching her while Blaine was working. They still visited on the occasional weekend for her decadent brownies. “It’s one weekend. You don’t have to go to Dalton with me if you don’t want to, but I’m not going to leave you in New York City on your own, and Auntie Jasmine has a life of her own. You can decide if you’d rather stay with Grandpa Alexander or if you want to visit your other grandparents.”

She snorted. “So Auntie Jasmine has a life but Grandpa doesn’t.”

Blaine sighed, finally. “What’s wrong with Ohio?”

“What isn’t wrong with Ohio?” she snorted, kicking her ankles. “It’s nothing but corn fields.”

“It’s no New York,” Blaine agreed, “but one weekend with some corn fields won’t kill you.”

“Seriously?”

“Nobody’s dropped dead from seeing corn fields yet.”

“Yet.” She scowled. “Why can’t I just stay here?”

Blaine closed his eyes. He felt like he had been swept out into the sea, and, without purchase, was drowning with each wave. He grasped the only thing he could: “It’s one weekend, Sophia. You can put up with corn fields and visiting your grandparents for one weekend.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia spent the whole plane ride sulking.

“It’s not that bad,” Blaine said, again. It was the fifth time he had said so on the plane ride, let alone all the times he’d brought it up in New York. They dragged their suitcases out the airport, Sophia mulishly glaring at the storefronts as if they had personally offended her. “The other alumni bring kids. There’ll be other kids your age.”

“I could be with my friends in New York.”

“Sophia,” Blaine said. He stopped, nudging them out of the bulk of the crowd to the side of the path. She frowned up at him. She had been such a happy child, easy to raise. Her mercurial mood as a teenager, however—

“You aren’t a kid anymore.” He tried for firm, but he could hear frustration in his voice. “You can spend one weekend in Ohio without complaining.”

“God, that’s not even the point,” she muttered.

“Then what is?”

“Never mind.” She rolled her eyes.

Blaine closed his eyes. “Alright. Listen. I know you don’t want to be here, but you can be polite to your grandfather.”

“Fine.”

“Alright.” He grabbed his suitcase again. “Com’on. We’ll get a cab.”

But as they emerged from the airport, it was to a graying Albert Smythe leaning against the rails. “Alexander told me you guys were coming,” he said, ruffling Sophia’s hair. She very resolutely did not scowl. Blaine appreciated the effort, on both of their parts.

“You didn’t need to,” Blaine said, as he had many times before. Albert snagged Sophia’s bag, leaving Blaine to manage his own as they walked to the car. “We could have caught a cab.”

“Yeah well,” Albert said, “couldn’t let family take a _cab_.” He glanced at Sophia. “Want to sit in the front?”

“Can I?” Sophia perked up.

Blaine, glad that Sophia was finally out of her sulk, gave his agreement. He settled into the back seat, his knees pressed against the seat in front of him in familiarity as Albert drove them back to Alexander’s house. Albert was happy to keep up a stream of casual conversation, updating them on the latest family news. Sophia even managed to perk up in interest.

“And Alyssa’s given birth,” Albert said, finally.

Blaine stiffened. “Oh?” he managed to say, with as much normalcy as he could muster.

“Yeah.” Albert met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “A girl.”

“What’s her name?” Sophia asked. “Is she cute? Can we see her?”

Blaine looked away.

“She’s pretty cute.” Albert said. “I’ve got pictures on my phone. I can show you when we get your grandfather’s place.”

“What’s her name?” Blaine asked, his throat dry.

Albert met his eyes again, before turning back to the road. “Dawn. Her name is Dawn.”

  


* * *

  


Blaine sat at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee in his hands. Sophia had been happy to hole up in her room with her laptop and the internet password, chatting with her friends. “I didn’t know that Alyssa gave birth again.”

Alexander swirled his snifter of brandy. “We weren’t keeping it from you,” he said. “She hasn’t sent out a family email yet, so none of the folks out of state know about Dawn.”

“I didn’t even know she was expecting.”

“Most of us didn’t.” Alexander frowned. He was getting old. He could have retired a few years back, but he had chosen to keep working instead—as a legal consultant now. The work kept him busy enough, with enough flexibility to appeal to his aging years. “Alyssa is… well, you know how she is.”

Got pregnant and gave up her baby to the first available family member. Blaine was aware.

“Sophia doesn’t know that Alyssa’s her mother,” Blaine said, the words like ashes. “She knows she’s adopted, but she hasn’t asked who.”

“Will you tell her, when she asks?” 

“Yes,” Blaine said. He had always known he would. He was glad it had never come up. “She has a right to know.”

Alexander sipped his brandy. “But you’re worried.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” He closed his eyes. “She’s old enough to ask.”

“And what would that do?”

Blaine shrugged.

Alexander set down his glass. In the fluorescent lights of the kitchen, the brandy caught flickers of light. “You have an early day tomorrow.”

Blaine choked on his laugh. “Yeah. Warbler reunion. It’s going to be a crowd.”

“Will you bring Sophia?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “She didn’t want to come. I doubt she’d want to go hang out with a bunch of old folks. Her words, not mine.”

“I’m happy to entertain her.”

“Thanks.” Blaine stared down at the table.

“Have a good time,” Sebastian’s father said, very seriously. “Life’s too short otherwise.”

  


* * *

  


The reunion was held in one of the Dalton gymnasiums, the senior commons being too small to contain generations of Warblers returning from all across the country for yet another Warbler reunion. This year, a corner of the gymnasium had been turned into an open bar, courtesy of many alumni donations. 

“Blaine! Over here.”

There were plenty of alumni, in varying ages but Nick, Jeff, Thad, and Trent had found a corner not far from the bar. Wes was somewhere else, probably with Warblers his own year, so Blaine made his way to the rest of his cohort—the ones who had made it out to Ohio. Jeff had grown a beard, and Blaine had to do a double-take. Trent had lost weight, apparently the result of many walks throughout downtown Seattle, where he lived and worked. Too congested for a car, he explained. 

“No Sophia?” Nick asked.

Blaine shook his head. Some of the other Warblers had brought their significant others and kids, but none of his cohort had. Blaine was glad that Sophia had stayed behind. “She’s with her grandfather.”

Thad snorted into his cup. 

“Oh don’t be like that,” Trent said affectionately. “At least Sophia flew out to Ohio with Blaine. Your kid didn’t even make it out of the state.”

“He’s with Amelia,” Thad elaborated at Blaine’s raised eyebrow. “They didn’t want to come. She avoids Warbler things.” 

“Was she scared she’d get serenaded again?” Jeff drawled.

“We could go to a mall to recreate the Gap Attack,” Nick added.

“Let’s not,” Blaine interrupted.

“One attempt at murdering my wife was enough for you?” Thad raised his glass of wine in a toast. “Thank god for that.”

“I was sixteen,” Blaine pointed out, rankled.

“God, that was so long ago.” Thad drained his wine. “I’m going to need more wine if we’re going to think about when we were _sixteen_.”

“You were fifteen!” Nick shouted at Thad’s back as he wandered over to the bar. “Okay, Smythe.” He flung and arm around Blaine’s shoulders. “Tell me what song plans you have in store for us.”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “I was sixteen,” he said, again.

“Yeah, sure. So who are we serenading now? And where? I heard the Gap closed down and there’s an American Eagle in its place. They’ve got mannequins to knock down in the name of love.”

Blaine drained his wine. Nick’s arm was a heavy weight. “I might also need more wine.” He shrugged, and for a moment, he thought that Nick’s arm would clamp down, but then he drew back.

“Oh, com’on,” Nick cajoled.

“Leave him be, Duval.” Trent shook his head. “How’s Sophia doing, Blaine?”

“She’s fine. She’s a teen now.”

“They grow so quickly,” Nick said, nostalgically.

“You don’t even have a kid,” Jeff reminded him.

“So? That doesn’t change how fast kids grow.”

“How would you know how fast kids grow?”

“I visit my nieces and nephews!”

“You visit them twice a year!”

Blaine rolled his eyes at the warmly familiar sight of Nick and Jeff, reunited, happily squabbling. He left them to their antics, wandering over to the bar to get his wine glass refilled. Thad, having successfully negotiated the line of alumni, raised his glass in a toast on his way back.

He was halfway through the line when his phone buzzed. Bemused at what could possibly warrant a text from a five-minute digression to a drink line, he absently pulled it from his pocket, and then froze. 

“Are you going to move forward?” another Warbler alum tapped him on the shoulder.

He stepped forward, eyes still on the phone.

Sophia, holding Dawn, beamed up at him from the screen.

*

Wes snagged him by the arm. “Where are you going? The Warblers haven’t even performed yet.”

Blaine stared back at him.

“Blaine?”

“Wes,” Blaine said. The world was still rotating on its axis. The chatter of the crowd ebbed and flowed, alum greeting each other after long absences. He blinked.

Wes hauled him over, first out the door, and then to a bench outside where they sat under the bright sun. Summers in Ohio were hot, and this weekend was no different. There was a pervasive heat that settled, like a blanket of humidity, over his skin. The familiarity was warming.

But he felt very cold.

Wes looked at him. He didn’t say that he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Instead, he asked, “Sebastian?”

Blaine shook his head. “Sophia,” he said, finally. “Her real mother—”

“Her birth mother,” Wes said, nodding.

“Alyssa had a baby recently. She’s never… I didn’t know that she was even thinking about having a baby. Sophia went with Alexander to see the baby.”

Wes nodded. “Was she upset?”

Blaine blinked. “Alyssa?”

“Sophia.” His voice was very gentle.

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Blaine blinked, again. He scrubbed his face with his hands. “God, I don’t know. She looked fine, I guess.”

Wes waved a couple of other alumni as they passed by. Under the bright sun, Blaine felt very still. Wes studied him, for a long time, and then asked, “Does she know that Alyssa is her birth mother?”

Blaine shook his head. “She’s always been an aunt. Just one of many.” He wondered if that would change.

“Do you think Alyssa will tell her?”

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. The sun was bright on his eyelids. “How would she feel? Alyssa gave her up, and now she has a new baby. It was fine when Alyssa didn’t have any other kids, but now…”

“There is nothing shameful in needing time to settle things,” Wes’ voice was low and steady, like their conversations at the dorm shrine. “You know that.”

He did. He had his own disastrous year to look back on. “It’s a big change for her.”

“Then talk to her,” Wes said. He patted Blaine on the knee. “Are you still going to run off?”

Blaine took a deep breath. The walls of Dalton Academy loomed, solid, steadfast, unchanging, a bastion in the midst of overwhelming tides. “I’m good.”

“Good.” Wes stood. “The current Warblers have some performances planned, I hear. And they aren’t even going to perform them in a Gap.”

Blaine’s laugh was wrenched out of him. “Nobody’s going to let me forget that, are they?”

“Probably not.” Wes hauled him to his feet. “Good thing it worked out though, didn’t it?”

Blaine shook himself. Forced himself to smile. “I don’t know about that. I heard the Gap closed and there’s an American Eagle in its place.”

Wes threw back his head and laughed, loud and clear in the summer sunlight. 

  


* * *

  


Blaine stayed for the entire Warbler performance—a medley of Latin-inspired pop hits, including now-retro songs such as Despacito. Thad looked reluctantly impressed with the performance. Wes, who apparently regularly attended local performances, looked paternally proud.

Blaine found it hard to focus. 

He’d sent a message to Alexander, who hadn’t replied yet. Perhaps he had been driving. Driving Sophia back home, after they had visited Alyssa and Dawn. Blaine stared at the Warblers on stage as they stepped in time as they sang. Their jackets blurred into a mass of navy with red piping.

The message had been coherent, mostly. Just a note of: I didn’t know you were going to take Sophia to visit Alyssa. Nothing accusatory. Nothing questionable. But he didn’t understand why Alexander would do that—would take Sophia to visit her real mother and her real sister and…

Wes nudged him, just briefly. The crowd was applauding. Blaine forced himself to join in.

He hadn’t heard much of anything.

“They’re good,” Nick said. Blaine forced himself to listen. “That was some nice harmony they had going.”

“Do they still arrange all their stuff themselves?” Trent asked.

“I’ve helped once—one of the boys comes by the temple—but they do most of the work themselves,” Wes was explaining. He nodded towards the boys, who were soaking in the praise. “They’re an independent bunch.”

“Like us,” Jeff observed. “Did we even have a faculty advisor?”

“He was very hands-off,” Thad, as a council member, had actually talked to their faculty advisor. “You’re really quiet, Blaine.”

Blaine blinked, again. “Oh,” he said. “They were good,” he said, finally.

The others exchanged knowing looks. 

“Has your husband stopped talking to you?” Nick asked.

“Problems in matrimony?” Jeff asked at the same time.

“Made any more trips into the realm of the dead?” Thad added.

Blaine gaped. “What?”

Wes hid his smile with a hand. The others exchanged bemused looks. Trent took pity. “The last time you were like this,” he explained, “was back in our sophomore year, when Sebastian disappeared.”

“I was not,” Blaine protested, automatically.

They exchanged glances again, an action which Blaine roused himself enough to consider a thoroughly unfair. 

“So what is it?” Nick slung an arm across his shoulders. “Com’on, tell Uncle Nicky.”

“That is so wrong.” Jeff rolled his eyes.

“I have nieces and nephews!”

“We know,” Thad drawled. “It doesn’t stop your behavior from being questionable at best and reprehensible at worst.”

“Thad, I know that you’re sad that Amelia didn’t want to come with you to this pow-wow—”

“I thought we were talking about Blaine’s problems,” Trent interrupted.

They glanced at Blaine, who tried to look as problem free as possible. At his silence, they turned to Wes.

“It’s Blaine’s decision whether or not he wants to discuss it,” Wes said, placidly, as always.

“We’re friends, aren’t we, Blainey?” Nick said immediately.

“Don’t call me that.”

“It’s a wonder your sister even lets you around her children,” Jeff muttered.

“I am a wonderful uncle,” Nick declared.

Thad snorted.

“We’re getting distracted again,” Trent said. With utmost earnestness, he said, “We’re here for you, Blaine. You can tell us anything.”

Nick and Jeff subsided.

Wes clapped Blaine on the shoulder. “I see David waving at me,” he said. He squeezed. “You going to be alright?”

Blaine nodded. As Wes slipped back into the crowd, he glanced at his classmates, his cohort. They had maintained contact through increasingly sporadic text messages, but they always roused themselves to wish Blaine a happy anniversary on the day of his marriage; Nick and Thad, also based in New York, arranged occasional meetings. Jeff, in San Diego, and Trent, in Seattle, didn’t make it east that often, but they tried to meet up when they did.

“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Trent began.

Nick’s expression disagreed, but he nodded in agreement.

“It’s fine.”

Thad raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“It’s Sophia,” he began.

Thad furiously slapped a bill into Nick’s hand.

“Did you seriously bet on this?” Blaine interrupted himself. “When did you even have a chance to put a bet down?”

“When you ran out and talked to Wes,” Jeff explained, rolling his eyes. “Only Thad took Nick up on it.”

Trent offered, “I told them not to.”

Blaine shook his head, torn between aggravation and amusement. Some things never changed, and in the halls of Dalton, it felt almost like they were kids again. “It’s Sophia. Her real mother gave birth, and she went to visit her and the baby.”

Jeff glanced at him. “That’s nice of her,” he said.

“She doesn’t know that Alyssa—that’s the mother—she doesn’t know that Alyssa’s her mother.”

Nick and Jeff glanced at each other; the years apart didn’t seem to have influenced their uncanny ability to understand each other. Nick tugged Blaine closer, and said, “She’s one of the Smythes, right?”

“One of Sebastian’s cousins,” Blaine confirmed.

“Sophia’s known about her though, right? As an aunt?” That was Trent, brow furrowed.

Blaine nodded. “Yeah.”

“What’s the problem?” Thad demanded.

“Thad,” Jeff began.

“She visited her aunt who just gave birth,” Thad said. He scowled at Blaine. “I thought it would be more important.”

“Thad!” Trent said, this time, scandalized.

“Well, last time Blaine was sending his soul into the realm of the dead.”

“Thad,” Nick said, slowly, “even _I_ think that you’re out of line.”

Thad threw up his hands in exasperation.

“No,” Blaine said. “It’s fine.”

Jeff squinted at him skeptically.

“It’s fine,” he repeated. “Really. Thad’s right.” He inhaled, deeply, and then exhaled. “I just… I didn’t know that Alexander was going to bring Sophia to visit Alyssa.”

“That can be surprising,” Trent offered, tactfully.

Thad managed to look not as smug as he probably could.

Blaine scanned the crowd. After the Warbler performance, the rest of the alumni had gone back to mingling, sharing stories of their own time among the Warblers, dolling out unsolicited advice to the current students, drinking wine and nibbling on chips. He turned back to his cohort, so different, yet still the same.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Blaine said finally.

Nick cocked his head. “With Sophia?”

“I don’t know,” Blaine said, and in that moment, he didn’t know who he was referring to, his daughter, or himself.

  


* * *

  


“You took her to visit Alyssa?”

Alexander looked up from where was reading in his study. The desk light was low and golden, reflecting strips on the drawn blinds. It was late at night, Sophia had been tucked away with her cell phone and the internet to wile time away until she fell asleep.

“She asked,” Alexander said, steadily. “I saw no reason for her to meet her niece.”

Blaine hesitated in the doorway, for just a moment, and he was a child, having just moved into his father-in-law’s house, before he stepped in. He had lived here for years now. This was his home now.

Alexander took off his glasses.

“She—”

“She doesn’t know that Alyssa is her birth mother,” Alexander said. “She didn’t ask. I didn’t offer it.”

But Blaine felt himself tense all the same. “She’s going to start asking soon,” he said.

“Perhaps.” He nodded to a chair, and Blaine sat. “You’ll still be her father, Blaine.”

“I know that,” Blaine said. He closed his eyes. “I didn’t think Alyssa would have another kid.”

“Well,” Alexander said, his mouth twisted just enough to the side. “Neither did any of us.”

Blaine’s mouth relaxed, a little.

They sat in the silence of the room, while the clock ticked its steady seconds. His father-in-law turned back to his book. Blaine studied the shelves.

“The Warblers are doing well,” Blaine said, finally.

Alexander set his book down.

“It was good to see the others,” Blaine added.

“I’ve seen Wes Montgomery around,” Alexander said.

Blaine nodded. “He took over his family shrine a few years ago.”

“He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

Blaine swallowed. “He helped me a lot, when we were in Dalton.”

“He’s a year older than you, isn’t he?”

“Two years.”

Alexander made a mildly affirming sound. They sat in silence, for a beat, before Alexander sighed. “Blaine.”

Blaine looked up.

“I’ve never thought it was my place to give you advice regarding Sophia, but I hope you’ll take this.”

Blaine swallowed.

“Tell Sophia about Alyssa.”

He bit back the protestation.

“She’s old enough to understand,” Alexander said. “She’s old enough to know.”

“She’ll know that Alyssa didn’t want her,” Blaine said. “She’ll know that she’s lost two parents before she had a chance to have them.”

His father-in-law corrected, with infinite patience, “It was not a loss. She gained a parent.”

  


* * *

  


The morning passed and Blaine had nothing to say. Their flight back to New York was in the afternoon, Wes picked them up to go to lunch before dropping them off at the airport. They made light conversation, and Blaine did not talk to Sophia about Alyssa.

They returned home, Sophia happy to text her friends on her phone. Blaine poured himself two glasses of Courvoisier, setting one down on the shrine before Sebastian’s photo, unchanged, perpetually at fifteen.

Sophia would turn fifteen in a few years, and then she would turn sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. She would grow older than Sebastian. She would graduate high school, go to college, get a job, make a family of her own. Everything would change.

Blaine stared at the cognac.

Everything was already changing.

That night, when he dreamed, it was to Sebastian, fifteen, standing in Dalton blazer in the doorway to Blaine’s dorm room. On the shrine, tucked into the corner of the room, a single stick of incense still burned, sending wisps of fragrant smoke into the air. The bedspread was rumpled in the corners, as if Blaine had made the bed in a rush to get to breakfast and class. There was an open binder sitting on the desk.

Sebastian stepped in.

Blaine stared. At some point, Sebastian had stopped aging, perpetually in his twenties as Blaine had continued to grow older and older. Now, seeing him, his face still soft with youth, Blaine was arrested by a sudden pang of yearning.

He remembered long talks in that bed, dreaming of Sebastian. Sebastian had been with him, a constant companion, throughout his entire Dalton career. He had listened to Blaine’s concerns and worries before every performance. They had spent every night, so close that they could touch, so far apart that it was only the tips of their fingers, unable to hold on any tighter.

Blaine had travelled the realm of the dead. Sebastian had stayed by his side.

After Dalton, throughout his undergraduate and graduate studies, Sebastian had been there, still. They spent their dreams together, just the two of them. Blaine had the world outside, and in his dreams, he had his husband.

And after that—

Through graduations and weddings, through Sophia’s growth year after year, Sebastian had remained in his dreams, a steady constant throughout all of the change. And at some point, Sebastian’s face had frozen, perpetually young, as Blaine had grown older and Sophia had grown taller.

There had been something comforting, about Sebastian’s unchanging presence. His dreams were a haven, a place where Blaine could remain, frozen at whatever time he chose.

He studied Sebastian’s face—it was the same face that had called him husband with no affection, that first time they met. It was the same face that had drawn away and sent Blaine into the realm of the dead. It was the same face that he had learned to love, to cherish, to grow with.

“Look at you. You haven’t changed a bit,” Blaine quipped, but it sounded too true even to his ears.

Sebastian said, “Is that a good thing?”

In the dorm room that Blaine had resided in since his second freshman year of high school, Blaine looked back at the years—the pain, the joys—and then thought of the future, lying in wait, and said, with quiet decisiveness, “No.”

  


* * *

  


He told Sophia about her birth mother, answered her questions, and called Alyssa to explain that Sophia knew, now, and if Alyssa wanted to build a new, different, relationship with his daughter. But they had been aunt and niece for years, already, and knowing that Alyssa had given birth to her hadn’t inspired radical change in his daughter. Over the next few years, Sophia took the time to meet up with Alyssa and Dawn when they returned to Ohio to visit family, but otherwise, she seemed content to continue with her life as is.

The week after they returned to New York, Blaine went to brunch with Nick and Thad. Nick brought his wife, Lisa. Thad came with Amelia and their son, Dominic.

Blaine brought Sophia.

Without Jeff around, Thad had stepped up as straight man to Nick’s comic. Despite Thad’s claims to the contrary, Amelia seemed affectionately bemused at the whole situation, having moved on from that disastrous event in their high school lives. Sophia and Dominic, only a year apart, spent the time happily chattering about their classes and projects. They left after making plans to meet up again, and they did, a month later.

And like that, month after month, year after year, time passed until Sophia entered high school, and then college.

And then Alexander Smythe died.


	5. 考終命

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every life comes to an end. What matters is how we lived it when we were alive.

Alexander Smythe’s funeral was held on a Sunday. Smythes flew in from across the country to attend as he was interred in the family plot in Ohio. Sophia, twenty-one and studying dance and theatre in San Diego, arrived via red-eye on Saturday morning, bleary eyed from finals and the subsequent flight. 

Blaine had been in Ohio for almost two weeks, already. As Sebastian's husband, as Alexander's son, Blaine had been in charge of arrangements. He'd flown to Ohio when Alexander had been hospitalized; Albert had picked him up from the airport, the two of them sitting in somber silence. NPR played in the background as they went from airport to hospital, so quiet that they could barely make the words out, too loud in the rush of air from the car air conditioning. He had made it to the room before his father-in-law passed, made it in time to sit by his bed, to hold his hand.

The funeral was a quiet affair. Sebastian’s mother Isabella flew in from Paris, where she had been living for decades, now. Her hair was gray and her face grave and her grief muted and subdued. Albert, his hair thinning and his mouth pressed tight, led the services. He lit the incense, passed it, fragrant and smoldering, to the family members as they came up and made their bows. Blaine and Sophia made their bows together, side-by-side, an empty space between them. 

Blaine’s parents came. Cooper didn’t. Smythe after Smythe filed into the seats, one after another. Friends and their children and their grandchildren, old clients who remembered Alexander’s assistance fondly—they settled down, one row after another, an endless sea of faces, drawn stark in grief, drawn flat in sorrow.

And when it was done, it was Blaine and Sophia, in the house that Alexander had lived in, a new photo on the shrine, fresh incense filling the air with agarwood.

A week later, Sophia flew back to San Diego for school. Blaine stayed in Ohio. 

  


* * *

  


In his dreams, he walked a vast expanse of emptiness. The sky was bright, the grass beneath his feet soft. When he inhaled, he could smell agarwood, smoldering steadily throughout the night.

Sebastian met him halfway, as if emerging from mist.

They stood in silence, so close that their shoulders could touch if they swayed to the side. Sebastian was first to bend, stepping closer until their finger tips brushed. Blaine brought their hands together, laced their hands one finger after another.

“Guess my old man finally died,” Sebastian said.

Blaine nodded.

“How old did he make it?”

“He was eighty-six.”

“Seventy-one more years than me. Dad always was an overachiever.”

Blaine rolled his eyes.

Sebastian said nothing, just stood, holding Blaine’s hand in his. They stood in silence, and finally, Blaine murmured, “Is he here now?”

Sebastian raised a brow. “Want to talk to him?”

He shook his head. “I just—have you talked to him? Since he died?”

Sebastian tilted his head back, studying the expanse above them. “I think you knew him better than I did,” he finally said.

Sebastian had moved to Paris in elementary school, away from his father. Isabella and Alexander had had an amicable separation, and Sebastian had spent many summers in Ohio, mostly resenting the time away from his friends and the city that he had grown familiar with. 

Sebastian had died when he was fifteen.

Blaine thought of birthdays and holidays with Alexander Smythe, who held Sophia so carefully as a baby, who had held her hands as she learned to walk, who read to her and played with her and loved her. He had never quite known what to do with Blaine, who had married his dead son, but he had known Sophia, and through them, Blaine had understood his father-in-law’s quiet love.

“Do you want to? Talk to him?”

Sebastian was quiet, for a long time. Finally, he said, “Maybe in another life, we could try the father and son thing again.”

  


* * *

  


The house was transferred into his name, as well as the majority of Alexander Smythe’s assets. Blaine stood in the hallways, and the house was his now: in name, if not in spirit.

In a drawer of the shrine, framed photo sat on top of framed photo, growing in age as Blaine moved down the stack. The frames grew heavier, the older the photo. Blaine wiped the dust from each frame, set them back into the drawer, moved on. In the many drawers, he set through the steady task of organizing the shrine.

He was now head of this family.

Alexander Smythe, his face somber, cheeks creased with age, stared out from the shrine. Sebastian smirked with him, perpetually caught at fifteen.

Blaine wiped down the shrine. He organized the drawers. Room by room, drawer by drawer, he put the house into order, and when it was done, he locked the door behind him, and returned to New York.

  


* * *

  


A few years later, he moved back to Ohio.

“Did you think that you would be back here, when you left?”

Blaine paused, halfway through unpacking a box. This one had been labeled books, but was half full of linens as well. “Here, in this house? Or here, in Ohio?”

Wes, arms deep in a box of his own—kitchen supplies, it said, but it had linens in it as well—said, “Ohio.”

Blaine took a deep breath. Outside, the sky was hazy with impending winter. Alexander Smythe’s house—his house now—seemed hollow and dark, his voice cavernous in the expanse. “I don’t think I ever thought about this.”

In the silence, Wes said, “I saw your mother.”

“Did she recognize you?”

Wes shook his head.

“Yeah.” Blaine closed his eyes. “That’s what I thought.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia called that afternoon. “Is Grandma fine?”

Blaine was beside his mother. She had fallen asleep, taking a nap. She hadn’t recognized him.

“Her dementia’s getting worse,” Blaine said quietly. “You might want to come visit soon.”

  


* * *

  


Blaine and Albert sat in the kitchen, coffee in hand. The room was quiet with early morning. Outside, birds chirped, their song muffled through the double-paned glass.

It would be a bright day. Hot. Not too humid. It was spring time, and the flowers were budding. The garden outside was lush with life.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Albert asked.

The coffee was hot. Steaming, really. Too hot to drink. It’d scald his mouth.

Blaine took a sip anyways.

His mother had loved gardening.

“Everybody dies,” Blaine said. He thought of Sebastian, in a tower in the realm of the dead. He thought of bouquets of forks, shining in the sunlight. He thought of Sebastian, always present, never here. “In the end.”

  


* * *

  


Sophia came back to Ohio for Blaine’s mother’s funeral. She came back six months later for Blaine’s father’s. They flew to Paris for Isabella’s two years later. And then it was just the two of them, in Ohio, in the house where Sebastian had once lived.

  


* * *

  


Sebastian’s hand was warm on his cheek. Blaine turned, roused from sleep into his dreams. “Hey,” he said.

His husband said back, “Hey.”

“Did I fall asleep?”

“Yeah.” Sebastian nodded. Blaine had taken over Alexander’s study. His papers lay, strewn across the table. He was in the process of setting up a music therapy program in Westerville Hospital. He’d become an administrator, sometime during these many years. He still wasn’t sure when it had happened.

Blaine stretched. His back creaked. He was getting old. Sebastian looked unfairly young beside him.

“I love you,” Blaine blurted. It was imperative that Sebastian know. It was imperative that Sebastian understand. “I don’t—”

Sebastian’s head bowed. He had come as he was. He said, “Come to bed.”

They walked, hand-in-hand, out the study and up the stairs. The hallway was dark, and their steps muffled on the carpet. Sebastian pulled back the covers on the bed, and Blaine crawled in.

“Are you joining me?”

Sebastian sat on the edge of the bed, on top of the covers. It pulled the blankets down tight against his chest. Everything seemed to fade from there.

“Sebastian?”

Sebastian leaned over. His lips were warm and dry on his forehead, and Blaine was here and there, floating in an endless expanse.

“Sebastian?”

  


* * *

  


When he woke up, he was lying on his desk, cheek pillowed by the papers surrounding him, a throw from the living room thrown over his shoulders.

Blaine pulled the knit around his shoulders. There was a chill in the air despite the impending spring. He padded up the stairs, checking the doors and lights along the way—all locked, all turned off. Upstairs, a light shone from the cracks around a door.

“Sophia?” He knocked.

There was a quiet shuffling, and then the door opened. For a moment, he didn’t recognize her: older, hair swept to the side as she got ready for bed, eyes as green as Sebastian’s. Her brow furrowed.

“Dad?”

“When did you get in?” Blaine pulled the throw higher on his shoulders.

“A few hours ago.” She shrugged. “I’m flying back to New York in two days. I just wanted to see you.”

“I could have picked you up from the airport.”

“Uncle Albert did. It’s fine.”

Blaine nodded, slowly. 

She looked at him. “Don’t stand in the doorway, Dad.”

He sat down over the covers as she climbed into bed. For a moment, she was a child again, demanding bedtime stories and to be tucked in. For a moment, she was a teenager again, falling in and out of love, pirouetting from one interest to the next. For a moment—

“Why did you marry him?”

Blaine stared at the wall. There was a photo of her college graduation. Cooper, their parents and Isabella Smythe had gone. Alexander had died the year before. She was holding a bouquet of flowers and beaming, a garland of orchids around her neck. 

“Sebastian?” Blaine asked.

“Yeah.”

She had another photo on the wall—one of her dance recitals, in the La Jolla Playhouse. Cooper had driven down to watch. Blaine hadn’t been able to make it. He had an arm flung over Sophia’s shoulder, his then girlfriend on his other side. They had gotten her flowers. The flash had been bright, shining on her forehead and her cheekbones. She was beaming, flush with exertion and exhilaration both.

When she had been younger, Blaine had told stories of love. He had told stories of duty. He had told whatever stories he deemed the right lesson for his daughter, all coached in truth. But now, his daughter an adult, him nearing the age of retirement, he sighed, heavily, and said, “I didn’t want to be alone.”

She looked at him, keenly.

Blaine closed his eyes. “I didn’t know a lot of things, when I was younger. I didn’t know what it was like, to be in this world. I didn’t know what marriage meant. When I married Sebastian, when I married your father, I was fifteen, and scared of what it meant to be alive and gay in this world.”

“So you married a ghost.”

“So I married Sebastian.”

And Sebastian had come to him in a dream, had called him husband and used it as an insult. Had looked at Blaine, with his fears and flaws, and stepped away until Blaine had the strength and the courage to make it through the world alone. Had come back.

“It was a choice.” They had been married for over forty years, now. “A choice to marry Sebastian. A choice to stay with Sebastian. I love him, Sophia. I chose to love him. I chose to stay with him. I chose to be your father, to raise you, to call you mine.”

She looked at him, her face so young. She said, softly, “Did you ever regret it?”

He bowed his head. He thought of weddings where he sat, alone, surrounded by his friends as they had paired up. He thought of Cooper, asking him about Broadway dreams. He thought of Sophia’s one year in public school, and the doubts and worries he had. He thought of Alyssa, who had never asked for Sophia back.

“Of course,” Blaine said, finally. “Of course I had doubts. Of course I had regrets.” He brushed a hand over her hair. “I’m only human.”

“I thought you were superhuman,” Sophia cracked.

Blaine smiled, but he said, soberly. “I had regrets. But never enough to change things.”

She smiled. “That’s good.”

“Yeah? What brought this on?”

Her hand found his, snaking out from the covers to press, palm to palm. It was like she was a child again, and he clutched at her hand at every intersection for fear that she would leave him.

“You’re getting old,” she said, very quietly. “And I worry.”

“I’m not that old.” There was a photo of Sophia at one of her friends’ weddings. “I’m only sixty.”

She turned, tapped the phone on her bedside table with a free hand. The screen lit up. “Sixty-one, now.”

Blaine shook his head. “Always keeping tabs on me, aren’t you?”

She curled on her side, blinking at him. She looked like a child, again.

“Happy birthday, Dad.”

  


* * *

  


His hands were growing old. He had never lost the strength necessary to play piano, but as he stared down at his hands, they looked different. Older. Not like his hands. Time had crept up on him when he wasn’t paying attention.

Blaine tapped out a scale—C major. Then the corresponding minor scale: A minor. Note by note, he tapped his way through the keys, rising up the notes, falling back down. Major key. Minor key. One after another.

He stopped on C, one octave higher. He opened his mouth, and when he sang, it was without words, a melody and harmony contained in him flying free.

  


* * *

  


Sophia came back to Ohio for Thanksgiving; Blaine was hosting dinner, at the table where Alexander Smythe had hosted so many other dinners. Albert came, hands gnarled, assisted by Alyssa’s daughter Dawn. She was taking over the family medium business. Alyssa was also there.

Alyssa, two glasses of wine in, studied Sophia with familiar scrutiny as Sophia bustled about the kitchen, happy to boss her cousins and nieces and nephews around. “She’s got your energy,” she observed.

Blaine curled his hands together. “She’s got Smythe stubbornness,” he replied, and it didn’t feel like a concession to admit.

Later that evening, after everybody had settled in, Blaine found himself at Sophia’s door again. This time, she had left the door open a crack, and when she saw his shadow, she poked her head out. “Hi, Dad.”

The winter chill was coming in, despite the heater churning away. It was late November and the leaves were stripped bare, the fields lay empty. Blaine pulled the sleeves of his sweater down. “It’s getting cold,” he said, lamely. “Do you have enough blankets?”

She stepped forward. Her arms wrapped around him. “I love you, Dad. You know that, right?”

He closed his eyes over her hair. “Of course,” he said. “I love you too.”

They stood there, just breathing each other in. Finally, Sophia murmured, “I met somebody, yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. His name’s William.”

“And how did you meet him?”

“Sat next to him on the plane. He’s a doctor.”

Blaine closed his eyes. “What’s he doing in Ohio?”

“He’s got family here, too.” She closed her eyes. “We swapped numbers.”

“You going to meet up with him here?”

“Maybe.” She shrugged, pulling away. She was thirty now, and for years Blaine had seen her come and go without a significant other in tow. “You think I should?”

He was thirteen again, just betrothed to Sebastian, furious at his parents’ decision. He was fourteen, waking up in the hospital after taking a boy to a school dance. He was fifteen, and Sebastian had died without them having exchanged a single word.

“Do you want to?”

She hesitated. Slowly, throughout the night, she detailed their conversation on the plane, from when he had fallen into his seat with a sigh, fastened the seatbelt, and turned to make a wry quip about the weather, about cornfields, about his job. They talked about the performing arts, about dancing, about the impending flu season—“Did you get your flu shot, Dad?”—and the upcoming holidays.

“I told him that Papa was dead,” she said, finally. “I told him that we were going to light incense for him, this thanksgiving.”

Blaine bowed his head. “Alright.”

She blinked at him.

Blaine stood. “Let’s go.”

She scrambled out of bed as Blaine strode to the door. Their slippered feet slapped against the carpet, and then hardwood, as they made their way downstairs and then to the shrine down the hallway, dark wood, many drawered, a cloth of white draped over the top, Sebastian’s picture, Alexander’s picture, Blaine’s parents’ pictures sitting on the top, the frames dusted every morning, the glass kept smudge free. The jar of sand had several stubs of incense from earlier in the day, when relatives passed by the shrine. There was a vase of white snowdrops, their petals drooping. There was a plate of dinner rolls.

Blaine lit the candles on the shrine with the lighter he kept in the top drawer, lit the incense from the candles. Each holding the thin taper of agarwood, they bowed, three times, in silence.

In the silence, fragrant agarwood smoldering between their palms, Sophia murmured, “I met somebody, Papa.”

Blaine closed his eyes. 

“His name’s William Lee. He’s a doctor. I think that Gramps would have liked that. Even Grandpa Alexander would have. I don’t know if it’s going to work out, but I think I want to try. I think I want to meet up with him, talk to him, see if we get along.”

The house was dark and silent.

Sophia said, “Wish you were here, with us. With all of you were here.” She set the incense down in the sand. “Happy thanksgiving.”

Agarwood wreathed in the air. Blaine set his incense down in the sand. Arm in arm, they walked back upstairs. Sebastian smiled out at them, the entire way back.

  


* * *

  


Sophia and William got married several years later, in the heat of summer, at a lighthouse in New York City. Her wedding was an uproarious affair, with friends from her childhood, her high school years, her college years, and even her work as a dancer and choreographer attending. Albert Smythe came, as well as Alyssa and Dawn. William’s extensive family came as well. Blaine sat with Cooper, whose latest girlfriend, Sally, was a no-nonsense art historian working in the Getty. He thought maybe this one would stick around.

It probably should have been Sebastian, dancing with Sophia on the dance floor. They probably would have done better than sway to the beat of a waltz. But even though Blaine had put his two-stepping years behind him, he could still sway passably, sixty-plus years or not, and when he pressed Sophia’s hand into William’s, he found his chest tight with grief and joy.

Cooper nudged him as he slipped back into his seat. “You did good.”

Blaine watched as William swung Sophia, both of them beaming at each other. Dressed in silk in lace, she was radiant as she spun around. William brow was furrowed, dark eyes intensely focused, but Sophia was all joy as she practically leapt on the tips of her toes.

Blaine rolled his eyes. “Sebastian would have done better.”

Cooper gasped, more dramatically than the statement warranted.

“What?”

Cooper turned to his girlfriend. “We’ll be back.” He grabbed Blaine by the arm, hauling him towards the restrooms as the wedding party, and other guests, joined Sophia and William on the dance floor as some upbeat pop songs filtered through the sound system. Cooper’s grip was surprisingly tight despite his old age, and before long they were cloistered in the toilets, the door muffling the music.

“What?” Blaine repeated. The bathroom smelled strongly of lemon-scented cleaner.

Cooper turned to him, too serious. “I thought you were over this.”

“Over Sebastian?”

“Over making everything about your dead husband.”

Blaine’s mouth opened, and then shut. He turned, away, catching his reflection in the mirror. He’d gotten old, in the years since Sophia came into his life. His hair had started to go gray over ten years ago, and now it was a shock of thinning white. His face was creased with age—

And joy.

Blaine blinked. “Is this about the dancing?”

Cooper blinked back. “Dancing?”

Blaine opened his mouth, and then shut it. “What did you think I was talking about?”

“What were you talking about? About Sophia being all Sebastian’s kid or whatever?”

“I got over that ages ago!”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Maybe if you _called_ —”

The bathroom door creaked opened.

“It’s occupied!” Blaine and Cooper shouted in unison.

The door slammed shut.

In the silence, Blaine studied Cooper. He had also gotten old, though he had aged gracefully, no doubt due to his acting aspirations. The two of them had come a long way from when they squabbled in the basement, putting on shows for their family.

Cooper said, “You did good, with Sophia.”

Blaine closed his eyes. He thought of all the trials, the tribulations, the hopes and dreams. 

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t need some dead husband, in the end.”

“No,” Blaine swung an arm around Cooper’s shoulders. “I wouldn’t have made the decisions I did, if I didn’t marry Sebastian.”

  


* * *

  


Three and a half years later, Cooper and art historian Sally were still going strong, and Sophia gave birth to her son.

Blaine flew to New York to be with Sophia during the last weeks of her pregnancy and her birth. He had retired a year ago, leaving behind a thriving musical therapy department in the Westerville Hospital. He spent his free time working with the Westerville community theatre, playing piano for their musicals. It was easy to conscript Wes to take his place in rehearsals, before flying out to New York.

Thad was still living in New York, and he dragged Blaine out for lunch a few days before Sophia’s water broke.

“Sophia got married and you didn’t invite me?”

“I let her manage her own invite list,” Blaine tried. 

Thad rolled his eyes.

“Not this again,” Blaine muttered.

“You’re lucky that your pretty voice took us to Nationals,” Thad began.

“You can’t keep bringing up that Gap incident every time I do something,” Blaine tried.

“Considering that you almost _killed_ my wife—”

“Seriously? Again—”

“I could be childless…”

“You have three grandchildren,” Blaine interrupted. Thad sent pictures of said grandchildren every few weeks, immediately after he visited them. Apparently his grandchildren liked to hear the story of how Gramps and Gramma met, and Thad liked to embellish the story. At this point, Blaine was pretty sure that Amelia had a near death experience and had only survived via resuscitation.

Thad grinned. “Have I shown you how cute Penny’s gotten?”

Blaine was pretty sure that he’d seen it in the group chat, but if it kept Thad from talking about how Amelia had almost died in high school from being serenaded in public… “What have you got?”

Thad pulled out his phone. His youngest granddaughter Penny was two, and the only terrible thing about her was how terribly cute she was despite the many photos of her discovering the joy of cabinet handles. (Blaine suspected that Thad’s son Dominic would disagree, but refrained from saying anything.) His grandson, five years old and starting kindergarten, looked very dapper in his school uniform and backpack. His eldest granddaughter was seven, and very excited to show off her art projects, given the number of pictures Thad had of her holding up her crayon art. 

“Just wait,” Thad said, after they had finished a batch of photos, and he was pulling up another year’s worth of photos. “This will be you, soon.”

Blaine, watching a video of Penny’s first steps, said, “I can’t wait.”

Thad slid his phone over. “This,” he said. “I couldn’t have known it before, but this is what happiness is.”

Ray Lee was born in the early morning of impending winter, as the sun was rising, bright and warm in the cold air. Blaine held his grandson, his blotchy red face scrunched as he met the world for the first time, and it felt something like spring.

  


* * *

  


Three years later, Blaine held his granddaughter Emma as she was born, in the height of a summer afternoon.

Sophia smiled at him, William holding her damp hand. Ray sat on Sophia’s hospital bed, his three-year-old body practically vibrating with excitement.

“Want to see your sister?” Blaine asked.

Ray paused. He looked at his parents—William nodded at him, and then he said, with sweet aplomb, “No, you can hold her first.”

Sophia burst into laughter. Blaine’s chest spasmed with joy. And Emma? Emma started to cry. 

  


* * *

  


They visited for the holidays, just as Blaine and Sophia had visited Alexander Smythe. This time, it was Blaine who hosted them, in the large house in just outside Columbus, Ohio. Ray, now seven years old and old enough to pick his own room, chose the room that Sebastian had once lived in, enjoying having his own bed and his own desk his own closet in Grandpa’s house.

“Thanks for having us,” William said, after they had all lit a stick of incense at the shrine for Sebastian and the other relatives. The air was fragrant at the shrine: sweetly perfumed.

Blaine scooped up Emma, who squealed happily. His back ached with the strain. “It’s no problem.” Emma giggled, happily, as he hoisted her up.

Dinner was a lively affair, with Cooper visiting—he was still dating Sally, and she accompanied him with fond exasperation at his antics. And, when everybody was settled down, Blaine retreated to his bedroom. He was dozing when the door creaked open, and he turned on the light to see Ray peeking in.

“Hey, Ray. What do you need?”

He crept in on socked feet over the soft carpet, scrambling up the bed. Blaine tucked the blankets around his small body. Knees curled to his chest, he whispered, “Grampa?”

“Yes?”

“I talked about Grandpa Seb at school yesterday.”

“Did you?”

He nodded. “I said he was dead and you married his ghost.”

“I did.” Blaine wrapped an arm around Ray’s small body. He could feel the tiny breaths. “I was fifteen when I married your Grandpa Sebastian. We’ve been married for over fifty-five years.”

“Do you love him?”

Blaine ducked his head. “Yes.”

He said, “But Grandpa Seb’s dead.”

He laughed. “Yes. He is. He’s been dead for a long time. That doesn’t mean I don’t love him.” He thought of bouquets of forks and regifted roses. He talked of dancing under the stars on a rooftop terrace in Paris. Ray’s round face scrunched in a grimace.

There was quiet knock on the door. Blaine looked up to see Sophia, little Emma on her hip. He nodded at them to come in, and Sophia set Emma down to burrow onto Blaine’s other side, perching on the bed.

Blaine wrapped his other arm around his granddaughter. “We were talking about Grandpa Sebastian,” he explained.

Emma yawned. “Story?”

Ray perked up. “I wanna hear a story too.” He paused. “A _cool_ story,” he clarified.

Sophia smoothed a hand over their heads. Ray had the Smythe hair, but Emma’s hair was already darkening, taking after their father. She looked up, met Blaine’s eyes with a maturity that Blaine took in with serene satisfaction. “Do you want Grampa to tell you about his adventure with a dragon?”

“Did it breathe fire?” Ray demanded.

“Was it mean?” Emma asked.

Blaine kissed them each on the head. “It was a very large dragon, with scales of white and long whiskers. It knew where your Grandpa Sebastian was, and I was lost, trying to find him.”

Sophia’s eyes, so much like Sebastian’s, were fond and familiar, as Blaine recounted his journey, in the language of adventure and fairytales. Emma nodded off first, a few minutes in. Ray stayed awake for longer, but eventually his eyes began to droop, and then his chin, and then he was curled up against Blaine’s chest, soft breaths warm and steady.

His daughter whispered, “They’ve never stayed up until the end.”

Blaine ran a hand through Emma’s dark hair. “There isn’t an end yet,” he replied, just as quietly. Outside, the autumn leaves rustled in the wind. “Just a beginning, and a middle.”

Emma murmured in her sleep.

Sophia said, “Not just.”

“No.” He closed his eyes, relaxed into the pillows. “Living is never _just_. It’s work. It’s dedication. It’s patience.” He smiled, just a little. “It’s a hundred years of work to stand on the same ground together. It’s thousand years of work to lie in the same bed.”

She scooped up Emma, cradling her in arms that knew the dedication and patience needed for life. “Do you think you’ve reached a thousand years, now?” she whispered.

Blaine smiled. “I hope so.”

  


* * *

  


He was ninety-two, and dreaming.

They were lying in the same bed, side-by-side, so close that their fingertips could touch. If Blaine reached over, he could bring their hands together, one palm against the other. It was a touch that he had only experienced in dreams.

Sebastian’s hand twitched.

They were fifteen, and young again, competing against each other for solos. They were fifteen and—heads tucked next to each other’s—studying for finals and AP exams. They were eighteen and graduating high school, wondering whether or not the next four years of college would drive them closer, or apart. They were twenty, meeting up on spring breaks and summer holidays and in the days between Christmas and New Years.

They were twenty-five, getting married to the raucous applause of their friends and family.

Blaine whispered, “In our next life, let’s try again.”

Sebastian tangled their fingers together. They were ninety-two, and old. “Husband,” he murmured back, “did you even need to ask?”

He smiled at the ceiling. “I worry,” he corrected.

Sebastian pulled him close, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest. 

“Next time,” Blaine murmured, “find me sooner.”

“What about you?” Sebastian teased. “Aren't you worried about finding me?”

“No.” He lifted their entwined hands. “I caught you, didn’t I?”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “Yeah. I think I’ll keep you. Keep this.” 

Sebastian inhaled, and then exhaled, slowly. “Yeah,” he whispered. He squeezed. “I’ll find you. Come find me. Don’t give up on me.”

“After all that work? Never.”

“Yeah. We did pretty well, didn’t we, Husband?”

Blaine smiled. “I think so, Husband.”

“Next time…”

He murmured, “We’ll do better.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

Their hands still touching, Blaine smiled, and this time he didn’t wake.

  


* * *

  


At the top of a hill sits a house. The foundations are sturdy, the walls tall and firm, and inside, the rooms are filled with song: two voices, two bodies, dancing in joyful harmony. They are blessed: with health and integrity, rich with wealth and longevity, promised their fill of life. 

The sun shines: bright, warm, and golden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for joining us for this journey. I'm so glad I got to share it with everybody.
> 
> Post-writing commentary can be found [here](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/504808).
> 
> Thank you, again. It has been a joy and an honor to be able to share it with all of you.
> 
> As always, you can find me on twitter, and I'm always lingering around the seblaine discord channels.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Twitter [@virdant](https://twitter.com/virdant)
> 
> __
> 
> Chapters to be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays.


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